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Moiety is a very formal word for a half share: one of two equal parts of something that has been split. You will almost never hear it in a shop or a classroom chat. Lawyers, old wills, and books about kinship still use it. If two people own land the old legal way, each may hold a moiety — your half, my half. In some cultures a whole people is split into two big sides for marriage and ceremony; each side is a moiety. The point is always “one of the two halves,” not “a random piece.” Though actually, chemists also write moiety, and they do not mean a half. They mean one clear piece of a bigger molecule, a group of atoms that stays together and does a job. That is a different work-room using the same spelling. In ordinary English, just say half or share. Moiety is not a pretty you on daily talk.
一半的份額、半份。人類學說「半偶族」。日常幾乎不說這個英文字。
組成Borrowed from French moitié (“half”), from older French, from Late Latin medietās (“midpoint; half”), from Latin medius (“middle; half”) plus a suffix that names a state. It is a doublet of mediety: two English shapes from the same Latin parent.
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，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。
moietynoun/ˈmɔɪ.ə.ti/
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A half.
- They were faire Ladies, till they fondly ſtriu’d / With th’Heliconian maides for mayſtery; / Of whom they ouer-comen, were depriu’d / Of their proud beautie, and th’one moyity / Transform’d to fiſh, for their bold ſurquedry, / But th’vpper halfe their hew retayned ſtill, / And their ſweet skill in wonted melody; / Which euer after they abuſd to ill, / T’allure weake traueillers, whom gotten they did kill.
- The death of Anthony / Is not a ſingle doome. In the name lay / A moity of the world.
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A share or portion, especially a smaller share.
- "Thou must stand in the flame while thy senses will endure, and when it embraces thee suck the fire down into thy very heart, and let it leap and play around thy every part, so that thou lose no moiety of its virtue."
- To get lands you often had to deal with a hundred or four hundred owners, or an entire community. […] Other properties, originally bought by a farming group for so many pesos primitivos, had through the years seen the moieties endlessly subdivided.
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anthropologyhuman-sciencessciencesEach descent group in a culture which is divided exactly into two descent groups.
- The villages are divided into two patrilineal totemic moieties and two patrilineal ceremonial moieties. The totemic moieties are subdivided into patrilineal clans (ngaiva): there are between fifty and a hundred clans of which between ten or twenty are represented in any one village[…].
- The moieties are linked to or bear the names of beings or forces expressing the cosmic dichotomy. Most common are heaven and earth moieties, "above" and "below," or moieties named after birds and land animals (or aquatic animals), as is the case among the Winnebago and in the phratry system of the Northwest Coast Indians.
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chemistrynatural-sciencesphysical-sciencesA specific segment of a molecule.
- Aniline has both a phenyl and an amino moiety.
- We are therefore driven to the conclusion that the proteid food is split into a urea moiety and a fatty moiety, that the urea moiety is at once discharged, and that such of the fatty moiety as is not made use of directly by the body is stored up as adipose tissue.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。