adjacent: [15] Adjacent and adjective come from the same source, the Latin verb jacere ‘throw’. The intransitive form of this, jacēre, literally ‘be thrown down’, was used for ‘lie’. With the addition of the prefix ad-, here in the sense ‘near to’, was created adjacēre, ‘lie near’. Its present participial stem, adjacent-, passed, perhaps via French, into English.
The ordinary Latin transitive verb jacere, meanwhile, was transformed into adjicere by the addition of the prefix ad-; it meant literally ‘throw to’, and hence ‘a(chǎn)dd’ or ‘a(chǎn)ttribute’, and from its past participial stem, adject-, was formed the adjective adjectīvus. This was used in the phrase nomen adjectīvus ‘a(chǎn)ttributive noun’, which was a direct translation of Greek ónoma épithetos.
And when it first appeared in English (in the 14th century, via Old French adjectif) it was in noun adjective, which remained the technical term for ‘a(chǎn)djective’ into the 19th century. Adjective was not used as a noun in its own right until the early 16th century. => adjective, easy, reject
adjacent (adj.)
early 15c., from Latin adiacentem (nominative adiacens) "lying at," present participle of adiacere "lie at, border upon, lie near," from ad- "to" (see ad-) + iacere "to lie, rest," literally "to throw" (see jet (v.)), with notion of "to cast (oneself) down."
雙語例句
1. The schools were adjacent but there were separate doors.