Origins of names of algebraic structures Consider the names of basic algebraic structures: 'group', 'ring', 'space', 'field', 'Körper', even the name 'structure' itself  - all of them time-honoured terms, deeply rooted in our history and culture. 
But what has an algebraic field to do with an acre? What has an algebraic group to do with a group of people?
Even when it's known who coined these names (of algebraic structures), it's not obvious why they were choosen and what the connection is between the named structures and what was named originally (or later on). Only those who coined the names could tell.

Are there etymological studies concerning
  these names - 'group', 'ring',
  'space', 'field',... - which
  elucidate this connection?

 A: Ring came from Zahlring, which was Hilbert's term for what we would essentially call a ring of algebraic integers.  Dedekind earlier used the term ordnung (= order, taken from the Linnean classification terminology like class and genus).  For more on this, see the comments to the question Why is "h" the notation for class numbers?.
Fields in the algebraic sense used to be called bodies (thus closer to French and German).   [Edit: In 1900, Pierpoint's "Galois' Theory of Algebraic Equations, Part II", in the second volume of Annals of Mathematics, uses "body" for field and "inferior body" for subfield, introduced on page 25. In 1910, Legh Reid's "The elements of the theory of algebraic numbers" uses the term "realm" for field, or more specifically for number field. Reid's text can be found on Google books, and on p. vi of the preface he writes that "realm" is synonymous with Körper, corpus, campus, body, domain, and field. In 1934, Heilbronn and Linfoot wrote a paper "On the imaginary quadratic corpora of class-number one", so corpus was still in use in the early 1930s.]
A: I know that Stillwell's book "Mathematics and its History" claims that Galois introduced the word "group", though doesn't explain why he chose it.
A: For the origin of all names, see: http://jeff560.tripod.com/mathword.html
For the origin of all symbols, see: http://jeff560.tripod.com/mathsym.html
A: I'm not sure that I'm historically accurate, but that is how I always thought about algebraic nomenclature.
1) Group actually comes from group of substitutions. I guess that Galois could have introduced any other word, like "set" of substitutions or "flock" of transformations. Set theory was not yet established, so I guess a collection of functions could be called 'group', 'set' and so on according to the taste.
2) For field, I guess it comes from the meaning of field as "sphere", "subject", "area". It makes sense that such a word could come in talking about "solving an equation in the real field" rather than "solving an equation in the complex field". Then the concept of an abstract field could have followed.
3) Ring comes from "Zahlring", ring of numbers. This, as far as I know, is a terminology due to Dedekind. He was actually working with number rings, of the form $\mathbb{Z}[\alpha]$, where $\alpha$ is integral over $\mathbb{Z}$. So for some $n$, $\alpha^n$ can be expressed in terms of lower powers of $\alpha$; in some sense the components of the basis of $\mathbb{Z}[\alpha]$ over $\mathbb{Z}$ cycle, although this is accurate only when $\alpha$ is a root of unity. Hence the name ring of numbers.
4) Ideal is easy. When Dedekind realized that in a ring like $\mathbb{Z}[\sqrt{-5}]$ unique factorization does not hold, he searched for a substitute. He then realized could restore unique factorization allowing something more general than elements, the ideals. These are now called this way since he thought of them as "ideal elements" of the ring. useful to restore unique factorization. It is a fortunate coincidence that indeed for the rings he was working with (which are now called Dedekind rings), unique factorization for ideals actually holds.
5) Idéle has the same origin, being the contraction of the French "idéal élement", although the wording is inverted with respect to French use.
A: See the books A History of Abstract Algebra and Episodes in the History of Modern Algebra (1800-1950).
