- 1石中劍／王者之劍（亞瑟王的名劍，音譯「艾克斯卡利伯」；中文常說「王者之劍」，遊戲裡多半直接叫 Excalibur）
The name of King Arthur's sword in the old British legends. It is a name, not an ordinary word, so it always takes a capital E and no 'the' — you say "Arthur drew Excalibur", not "the Excalibur". In the stories, it is no ordinary weapon: in some tellings a hand rises out of a lake to give it to him, and when he is dying he orders it thrown back into the water. (The sword he pulls out of the stone to prove he is the true king is a different sword in many versions, though films and cartoons have blurred the two together.) Because everyone knows the story, the name gets borrowed: for hotels, ships, video-game weapons, and companies who want to sound powerful and a bit noble. If you use it in a sentence about something else, you are saying "this is the one legendary, unbeatable tool" — "Excel is her Excalibur" is a joke, but people would understand it.
組成The name travelled a long road: Old Welsh Caledbulch (modern Caledfwlch), from caled 'hard' + bwlch 'cleft, crack' — so, roughly, 'hard-cleaver'. Welsh became Medieval Latin Caliburnus in Geoffrey of Monmouth's history around 1136, then Old French Escalibor, then Middle English Excalaber. Along the way the Latin spelling was pulled towards calibs, a variant of chalybs, 'steel'. It is also related to Caladbolg, a legendary Irish sword whose name means literally 'hard-belly', that is, 'greedy, voracious'.
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
Excaliburname/ɛksˈkæ.lɪ.bɚ/
- 1
The legendary sword of King Arthur, having magical properties.
- Until recently, suppression of ethnicity has perhaps been the leading characteristic of the trend of thought of these Jewish intellectuals. Some, like Noam Chomsky and I. F. Stone, have been considered by some Jews to be so suppressed—or at least so overcompensating for their being Jewish—as to be regarded as anti-Semitic on some issues. Such men flaunt their universalism like Excaliburs of truth and objectivity.
- And we would see fish swimming among the tall bulrushes that rose like Excaliburs out of the lake.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。