You can think of siphon as a bent tube with one end down low. Put the high end into a full container and the liquid starts to travel, and then it keeps travelling on its own, quietly, until someone lifts the tube out. There is no machine and no noise, and from the outside almost nothing seems to be happening — but the container is emptying the whole time. That picture of a steady, self-feeding stream running off along a hidden path carries every other use of the word.
From the word’s history
Wiktionary traces siphon from Middle French siphon and Old French sifon, from Latin sīphō, from Ancient Greek σίφων (síphōn, 'pipe, tube'), and marks the origin beyond Greek as uncertain. The oldest recorded meaning is simply 'tube', which is still the centre of the word.
Wiktionary 的線索是：古希臘文 σίφων（管子）→ 拉丁文 sīphō → 古法文 sifon → 中古法文 siphon → 英文，並註明再往前的來源不確定。最早記錄到的意思就只是「管子」。那根管子到今天仍然是這個字的中心。
Wiktionary entry for 'siphon' supplied in this packet (kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:1096452646:16032)
登入就可以看每一支怎麼連回核心畫面。
原始詞典資料6 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。
siphonnoun/ˈsaɪfən/
- 1
A bent pipe or tube with one end lower than the other, in which hydrostatic pressure exerted due to the force of gravity moves liquid from one reservoir to another.
- The asserted fact that free hydrochloric acid is absent from the fluid removed by a siphon in cases of cancer of the stomach has been lately much discussed in Germany, and Dr Van der Welden, of Strassburg, introduced an alcoholic solution of tropæolin as a test with this object.
- 2
A soda siphon.
- 3
biologybotanynatural-sciencesA tubelike organ found in animals or elongated cell found in plants.
- As a result, although corbinas commonly utilize mollusks, they are limited to the siphons, foot, or other soft parts that either extend from the shell or can be picked from it.
siphonverb/ˈsaɪfən/
- 1
To transfer (liquid) by means of a siphon.
- He used a rubber tube to siphon petrol from the car's fuel tank.
- 2
To transfer directly.
- Today's teenagers are siphoning dangerous levels of membrane-damaging noise directly into their eardrums, with long-term effects that otologists prophesy will be disastrous for their hearing and lead to an epidemic of middle-aged deafness in the next thirty years.
- 3
To steal or skim off something, such as money, in small amounts; to embezzle.
- In Juchipila power to the whole community of thirty thousand evaporated as the supraheavy grid buried alongside the little mountain cantina siphoned energy from the entire west-central portion of the Namerican national power net.
- Attempting to “unfeel” whatever you feel is a huge drain on your energy, and that effort can siphon off the power you need to crunch your problem.
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。