- 1陸龜（烏龜）。台灣日常常常「烏龜」一詞通用，但要分的話：tortoise 是陸上的陸龜，turtle 是海裡的海龜，terrapin 是淡水的。美式英文則統統叫 turtle。
A tortoise is a slow land animal with a hard, high, rounded shell on its back. When it is , it pulls its head, tail and legs inside the shell and waits. Tortoises eat plants, walk very slowly, and live a long time — some more than a hundred years.
The pronunciation is a trap. It is "TOR-tuss", with the ending sounding like the word "tortoise" rhyming with "" — NOT "tor-TOISE" with a clear "oy" sound at the end. The spelling promises something the mouth never delivers.
Now, tortoise versus turtle. In British English the difference is clear and people care about it: a tortoise lives on land and has feet like an elephant's; a turtle lives in the sea and has flippers for swimming; and a freshwater one that lives in ponds and rivers is a . In American English, though, "turtle" is the general word for all of them, and Americans will happily say "turtle" about the land animal a British person would firmly call a tortoise. Neither side is wrong — they are just different systems. If you learn British English, keep the three words apart. If you watch American shows, do not be surprised when everything is a turtle.
The word carries a strong feeling of slowness, so English uses it as a comparison: "slow as a tortoise". This comes partly from Aesop's old story of the tortoise and the hare, where the slow steady tortoise beats the fast lazy rabbit — so "tortoise" can also quietly suggest patience that wins in the end, not just being slow.
From the word’s history
From Middle English tortuse, from Medieval Latin tortuca, of uncertain origin; perhaps from Greek 'holder of Tartarus', or Latin tortus 'twisted'.
源自中古拉丁文 tortuca，來源不明；有一說與冥界有關。
組成From Medieval Latin tortuca, and the road back beyond that is genuinely unclear — scholars disagree. One story links it to Late Latin tartarūcha, from Greek, roughly "a creature of Tartarus" (the underworld), because people once believed these animals came from below the earth. Another links it to Latin tortus, "twisted". Nobody has settled it. The odd English spelling with -oise was probably copied from porpoise.
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。
tortoisenoun/ˈtɔɹ.təs/
- 1
Any of various land-dwelling reptiles, of the family Testudinidae (chiefly Canada, US) or the order Testudines (chiefly UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, India), whose body is enclosed in a shell (carapace plus plastron). The animal can withdraw its head and four legs partially into the shell, providing some protection from predators.
- The tortoise, with its characteristic protrusion of the head and neck, was a symbol sacred to Venus. It represented the procreative principle.
- 2
Synonym of cat (sense 11, a wheeled shelter)
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。