You can think of tortoiseshell as one surface held up to the light: a polished brown sheet with pale yellow patches floating inside it, the patches blurring into the brown instead of stopping at a clean edge. That sheet was cut from the back of a turtle. Every other use of the word points back at this one surface — either at the stuff itself, or at something that wears the same mixed brown-and-yellow marking: a cat, a butterfly, a pair of glasses, the turtle the sheet came from.
From the word’s history
The word is simply tortoise + shell, literally the shell of a tortoise. The shell actually worked into combs and frames came mostly from a sea turtle, the hawksbill, so the name kept the land animal while the material came from the sea.
這個字就是 tortoise（陸龜）加 shell（殼），字面上是「龜的殼」。實際被做成梳子和鏡框的殼，多半來自海裡的玳瑁，所以名字留著陸龜，材料其實來自海龜。
Wiktionary entry for tortoiseshell (kaikki extract 3f6f69a190036ae4): 「From tortoise + shell.」; the hawksbill identification is from the same entry's first noun gloss.
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。
tortoiseshellnoun/ˈtɔː(ɹ)təˌʃɛl/
- 1
The horny, translucent, mottled covering of the carapace of the hawksbill turtle, used as a veneer etc.
- 2
The hawksbill turtle.
- 3
A domestic cat (or a rabbit, guinea-pig, etc.) whose fur has black, brown and yellow markings.
- 4
Any of several butterflies, mostly of the genera Nymphalis and Aglais that have similar markings.
- Other common farmland butterflies to have suffered steep declines include the small tortoiseshell (64%), the wall brown (37%) and the large skipper (35%).
tortoiseshelladj/ˈtɔː(ɹ)təˌʃɛl/
- 1
Made of the covering of carapace of hawksbill turtle.
- 2
Having markings resembling covering of carapace of hawksbill turtle.
- Speaking of round sunglasses, these lightweight polarized ones and come in two shades of tortoiseshell as well as black and bronze.
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。