- 1紀念物、信物（偏「留給自己記得某個人」，不是景點買的紀念品）
A keepsake is a small thing you keep because it reminds you of a person, a day, or a feeling — a ticket stub, a pressed flower, a cheap necklace, a note in someone's handwriting. It is not valuable as money; it is valuable as memory. The word feels warm and a little old-fashioned, more at home in a letter or a quiet conversation than in business English. A souvenir is often something you buy to remember a place; a keepsake is more often something tied to a person. People give keepsakes on purpose (a lock of hair in older times, a small gift before someone leaves) and they also become keepsakes by accident, when you cannot throw a thing away. You keep a keepsake; you do not really use it.
組成keep + sake. Sake here is an old English word meaning purpose or behalf (as in for your sake), not Japanese rice wine.
原始詞典資料2 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。
keepsakenoun/ˈkiːp.seɪk/
- 1
An object given by a person and retained in memory of something or someone; something kept for sentimental or nostalgic reasons.
- And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.
- My little keepsake—only a brooch—lay on the table at her bedside, with her prayer-book, and the miniature portrait of her father which she takes with her wherever she goes.
- 2
historicalSpecifically, a type of literary album popular in the nineteenth-century, containing scraps of poetry and prose, and engravings.
- He had brought the last “Keepsake,” the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progress at that time; and he considered himself very fortunate that he could be the first to look over it with her, dwelling on the ladies and gentlemen with shiny copper-plate cheeks and copper-plate smiles, and pointing to comic verses as capital and sentimental stories as interesting.
- […]it was the Italy that we know from the steel engravings in old keepsakes and annuals, from the vignettes on music-sheets and the drop-curtains at theatres; an Italy that we can never confess to ourselves—in spite of our own changes and of Italy’s—that we have ceased to believe in.
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。