- 1
Obeisance is respect you show, often with the body — a bow of the head, a bend of the upper body, sometimes a deeper bow toward the floor. It is the gesture, and also the attitude of to someone more powerful. You meet it in old stories, in talk about courts and kings, and in rather formal writing. Nobody in a café would say they made obeisance to the waiter. Though actually, the word is a close cousin of obedience: both grew from a Latin verb that meant, at bottom, to listen. Over time they split. Obedience is doing what you are told. Obeisance is showing, often physically, that you accept someone’s higher place. You can make obeisance to a person, and people also say pay obeisance to an idea or a tradition, meaning they treat it with that same respect — sometimes a little sharply, as if the bow were too much.
鞠躬致敬、臣服之禮（書面；不是日常的「禮貌」）
組成From Old French, from the same Latin verb as obey: ob- (“towards”) plus a root meaning “to hear.” The pieces originally said “listening toward” someone. The ending is the old French noun shape, which is why this word looks like obedience but is not spelled the same.
原始詞典資料2 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。
obeisancenoun/əˈbiː.səns/
- 1
Demonstration of an obedient attitude, especially by bowing deeply; a deep bow which demonstrates such an attitude.
- In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore; / Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
- But looking upwards in the blaze of the moon I suddenly saw colossi sitting near, and towering up and blotting out the stars and filling the night with blackness; and at those idols’ feet I saw praying and making obeisance kings and the days that are and all times and all cities and all nations and all their gods.
- 2
An obedient attitude.
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。