1. The word was already part of English before the Norman Conquest. Its first dated appearance is in the Ancrene Riwle, a guide written for women choosing a life of religious seclusion, in 1230, describing treacherous advice.

2. Old Saxon had a closely related word for deceit. Old High German also had its own word to describe deceit, and that German word is the ancestor of the modern German word Fehde, used for a long-running family dispute.

3. Behind the word lay a Proto-Germanic root, *faihaz, meaning 'hostile, or deceptive'. It may trace to the same ancient source as Sanskrit pisunah, meaning 'malicious'.

4. FOE and FEUD share the same root. FOE is native to Old English, originally meaning an adversary in a blood feud. FEUD entered English around 1300, from a Germanic word meaning enmity, or hostility, around the same time this word's own harsh edge was just beginning to soften.

5. By the late thirteenth century the word had softened from outright treachery into something more like unpredictability, especially of Fortune, or of a person’s own loyalty. Shakespeare gave the sense its most famous line, in Romeo and Juliet: ‘all men call thee...’. A related Middle English verb, meaning to deceive, later came to mean something quite different, to confuse or bewilder someone, a sense that survived long enough to appear in the novels of Sir Walter Scott.

6. Six letters.

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1. The word was first recorded in English in the 1520s, as a noun describing the arrangement of cargo in a ship's hold.

2. By 1544, in the Admiralty Court Libels, a court document, the word had become a verb. Behind it lay a French verb, arrumer, meaning to arrange cargo.

3. Arrumer was built on a Germanic word for 'space, or room'. It traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *reue-, meaning 'to open, or space'. The same root gave Latin its word for open countryside, and Russian its word for a plain.

4. ROOM and RURAL share the same root. ROOM is native to Old English, meaning space. RURAL entered English in the early fifteenth century, from Latin, describing anything belonging to the open countryside.

5. By the late sixteenth century the word had reversed its own meaning, now describing a sense of disorder and disturbance. By the early seventeenth century, customs officers used the word for searching a ship's hold, while pirates used it for plundering a captured vessel.

6. Seven letters.

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1. The word was recorded in English by 1388, from Latin, by way of French. A Scottish legal record, later published in the Douglas Book, described a woman's right to leave with her household staff and their possessions.

2. French had already used the word by the mid-fifteenth century, to describe the group of people who followed and served a person of high rank.

3. Behind that Latin word lay an even older Latin term meaning ‘servant, or slave’. Its own origin remains unknown, with no confirmed root beyond Latin.

4. DOMESTIC and SERVITUDE entered English in the early fifteenth century, both from Latin. DOMESTIC comes from a Latin word, domus, 'house', the word Latin used to describe parents and their children. SERVITUDE comes from a different Latin word, servus, 'slave', meaning the state of being enslaved.

5. By 1700, in accounts of Roman history, the word was also used to name a group of gladiators, all owned and trained by the same master. In twentieth-century American slang, the word was also associated with organised crime. And its use to describe household servants is now considered rare and historical.

6. Six letters.

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1. The word was recorded in English by 1640, from Greek, by way of Latin. Edward Reynolds, later Bishop of Norwich, used it to describe a phrase from the Roman philosopher Seneca, 'we live by dying'.

2. For centuries it was thought to be an ancient Greek word. But it has not been found in any surviving text from ancient Greece. Instead, it is believed that Latin scholars created it using two Greek words with opposite meanings.

3. Behind the word lay two Greek parts, one meaning 'sharp, or pointed', the other meaning 'foolish, or stupid'. The first traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *ak-, found in Latin acer and acutus, and Sanskrit acri- and acani-. The second has no confirmed root beyond Greek.

4. EAGER and VINEGAR share the same root, and are related to each other too. EAGER entered English in the late thirteenth century, from a French word meaning 'sour'. VINEGAR entered English around the same time, meaning 'sour wine'.

5. By the start of the twentieth century the word had broadened from a precise term for a specific figure of speech into its now common looser sense. In 1993, The Guardian used it to describe affordable caviar.

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1. The word was recorded in English by 1647, from Latin. L. Seaman, a political and theological writer, used it to describe the solemn, formal declaration that makes a man a king.

2. Latin gave English the word directly, without passing through French. It was built from a Latin adjective, formed from the name of a public gathering place in ancient Rome.

3. Behind that Latin gathering place lay a word meaning 'out of doors, or outside'. That word traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *dhwer-, meaning 'door, or doorway'.

4. DOOR and THYROID share the same root. DOOR is native to Old English, from the same ancient word for an entrance. THYROID entered English in the 1690s, from Greek, describing a gland shaped like an oblong shield, named after the shape of a door.

5. By the late eighteenth century the word still applied only to legal proceedings, as when Sir William Blackstone, an English jurist, described students distracted from their studies by these types of legal pursuits. Within twenty years the word had taken on a new meaning, describing scientific or medical evidence used for a type of investigation. By the late twentieth century the word had also come to describe anything done with extreme care and precision.

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1. The word was first recorded in English by 1398, borrowed independently from both Old French and Latin. John Trevisa, translating De Proprietatibus Rerum, a medieval encyclopaedia, used it to describe how blood strengthens and feeds every limb of the body.

2. Latin gave both Old French and English their own forms of the word. Its prefix, prae-, meant 'before'.

3. Behind that prefix lay a Latin verb meaning 'to have power, or be strong'. That verb traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *wal-, with the same meaning. The same root gave Old Irish its word for dominion, and Welsh its word for 'to be able'.

4. VALUE and WIELD share the same root, one meaning 'to be strong'. VALUE entered English around 1300, from a Latin verb meaning 'to be worth', a sense that grew directly from strength. WIELD is native to Old English, meaning to have power and sway over, and by around 1300 also to handle a weapon or tool.

5. By the early fifteenth century the word had come to describe having greater strength or power than a rival, and being victorious. By the mid-fifteenth century it was also used to persuade someone, a sense William Painter used in 1567, in his Palace of Pleasure, describing how one character's arguments won over another in a romantic tale. By 1544 the word had a theological meaning, describing the promise that the gates of hell would never overcome the Church. Then in the seventeenth century the word softened into its wider, modern sense.

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1. The word was recorded in English by 1325, from Old French. Geoffrey Chaucer, in the Canterbury Tales, described a devoted parson who visited the most distant members of his parish, in sickness and in hardship.

2. Old French had already used the word by the late twelfth century. It was formed as a noun from an existing French verb, one meaning to come to grief, or to be unfortunate.

3. Behind the French verb lay two parts, a prefix meaning 'badly', and a second element meaning 'to come to a head'. That second element traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *kaput-, meaning 'head'.

4. ACHIEVE and CAPTAIN share the same root. ACHIEVE entered English in the fourteenth century, from a French phrase meaning 'at an end, finished'. CAPTAIN entered English around the same time, meaning a leader, one who stands at the head of others.

5. By the sixteenth century lawyers used the word to describe the harm an individual person may suffer, compared to a law's wider public benefit, a distinction the poet Edmund Spenser named in 1599. By the late eighteenth century the word had softened, describing playful, harmless behaviour.

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1. The word first entered English by 1516, from Latin, and before that, Greek. The Kalendre of the Newe Legende of Englande, a printed collection of saints' lives, used the word to describe the city where Mellitus was made bishop in the year 604.

2. Latin borrowed the word directly from Greek, without passing through French. By the fourth century it named the seat of a bishop.

3. Behind the word lay two Greek parts, one meaning ‘mother’, the other meaning ‘city’. The first traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *mater-, found in languages such as Latin and Sanskrit. The second traces to a different root, *tpolh-, meaning a fortified hilltop.

4. MOTHER and POLICE share the same roots. MOTHER comes from the same ancient root as the first half, found in languages from Sanskrit to Old Irish. POLICE comes from the second half, entering English in the 1530s, originally meaning civil administration rather than a police force, which came centuries later.

5. By the 1580s the word had come to name the chief town of a country, and eventually any large, bustling city. By the mid-seventeenth century, it had also taken on its ancient Greek meaning directly, naming the state from which a colony had originally set out, as Thomas Hobbes described in 1651.

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1. The word was recorded in English by 1200, from Old French, and before that, Latin. William Langland, in Piers Plowman, used it for the suffering of a man condemned to death, questioned by a Roman official named Pilate.

2. Old French had already used the word by the tenth century, for Christ's suffering specifically. When it reached English around 1200, it replaced an existing native word for suffering, a word no longer in common use today, though it survives in dialect as a rare verb meaning to endure hardship without complaint.

3. Behind the Latin word lay a verb, patī, meaning 'to suffer, or to endure'. The deeper origin of that verb is uncertain, with no confirmed root beyond it.

4. PATIENT and PATIENCE share the exact same root. PATIENT entered English in the mid-fourteenth century, describing someone able to endure misfortune without complaint. PATIENCE entered English around 1200, meaning the quality of calmly bearing suffering.

5. By the sixteenth century the word had also come to mean fits of rage, and, separately, a sense captured in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in 1599. By the seventeenth century the word took on another sense, one that Roald Dahl later used in his novel My Uncle Oswald, when stating that embracing something fully, rather than staying lukewarm, was the only way to live.

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1. The word was recorded in English by 1325, from Anglo-Norman French, and before that, Latin. The Statutes of the Realm, an early collection of English laws, used it to decide how many local peacekeeping officials a town needed, based on its size.

2. French first used the word in 1267, where it meant a person's salary, or wage. It entered English by way of Anglo-Norman. Behind the French form lay a Latin noun, built from a verb.

3. Behind the Latin verb lay two parts, a prefix meaning 'ahead', and a verb meaning 'to see'. That prefix traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *per-, meaning 'forward'. The whole verb meant to look ahead, or to prepare in advance.

4. VIDEO and EVIDENT share the same root. VIDEO, Latin for 'I see', entered English in 1935 as the visual counterpart to 'audio'. EVIDENT entered English in the late fourteenth century, meaning clearly seen, or obvious.

5. By the late fourteenth century the word named the Pope's power to appoint clergy to English posts not yet vacant, bypassing the usual right of local patrons, a practice English kings tried repeatedly to restrict. The same word, in its plural form, was used in 1258 to name a set of reforms forced on King Henry III at Oxford, limiting royal power and demanding regular parliaments. By the seventeenth century the word described supplies kept ready for a journey or a siege.

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1. The word was recorded in English by 1390, from Latin, in a poem called Pistel of Swete Susan. Its Latin root named a two-pronged tool, used for digging and preparing ground for planting.

2. Latin gave the word to Old French by around 1180, and Old French gave it to English by the late fourteenth century. The Old French form also carried a second, ruder meaning, since dropped entirely.

3. That gardening tool gave its name to a Latin verb meaning 'to dig up the ground'. Its own name may trace to a Proto-Indo-European root, *pag-, meaning 'to fasten', though the connection remains disputed.

4. PASTINE and PAGAN share the same root. PASTINE, now rare, entered English around 1440, once meaning ground freshly dug for planting, taken straight from the Latin word for the digging fork. PAGAN entered English around 1400, originally meaning a country-dweller, from a Latin word for a fixed district, although the connection remains disputed.

5. Though the word names a plant from the Apiaceae family, its ending was reshaped in the Middle Ages by confusion with an unrelated word for a different vegetable, from the separate Brassicaceae family. That mix-up has never been corrected. By the nineteenth century the word had also become part of a common English phrase for asking someone's forgiveness, as heard in a line from James Joyce's Ulysses.

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1. The word was recorded in English by 1374, from Old French. Geoffrey Chaucer, in Troilus and Criseyde, used it for an unseen force believed to stream down from the heavens.

2. Old French first used the word in the thirteenth century, with two different meanings, the same celestial force, and a second, meaning an ordinary flow of water. Behind it lay a Medieval Latin noun meaning ‘a flowing in’.

3. Behind the Latin word lay two parts, a prefix meaning 'into', and a verb meaning 'to flow'. Behind that verb lies a Proto-Indo-European root, *bhleu-, meaning 'to swell, or well up'. In its oldest sense, the word described an unseen fluid believed to flow down from the stars, shaping character and destiny.

4. AFFLUENT and CONFLUENCE share the same root. AFFLUENT entered English in the fifteenth century, first describing God's abundant grace, and later having a lot of money or owning a lot of things. CONFLUENCE entered English around the same time, naming the point where two rivers flow together, and later a general coming together of different things into one.

5. By 1439 the word had already been applied to human beings, a person's own charisma described using the same language as star-power. In 1664 the philosopher Henry More, in his Modest Enquiry into Mystery of Iniquity, added a simple ending, meaning 'one who does', to name such a person directly. By 1968 the new form named someone able to sway a shopper's choice of goods. In 2000, the writer Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, described the idea of a small, connected group capable of creating a trend.

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1. The word was recorded in English before 1398, from Latin, and before that, Greek. John Trevisa, translating the medieval encyclopaedia De Proprietatibus Rerum, described a creature that, unlike most fish, left the water at night to feed on land.

2. An earlier form of the word entered English from Old French around 1300, its spelling altered from the original Greek. The medieval romance Kyng Alisaunder described it as 'wondrous'. By the 1560s the word had been reshaped again, closer to its ancient form.

3. Behind the Greek word lay two parts. The first traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *ekwo-, meaning 'horse'. The second traces to a different Proto-Indo-European root, *pet-, meaning 'to rush, or to fly'.

4. EQUINE and MESOPOTAMIA share the same roots. EQUINE entered English in 1765, from Latin, describing anything relating to horses. MESOPOTAMIA, the ancient region now largely within modern Iraq, takes its name from a phrase meaning 'between two rivers'.

5. By the 1570s the word also named a heraldic creature, unrelated to the real animal, with the head and forelegs of a horse and the tail of a fish, sometimes shown drawing Neptune’s chariot. This fantastical version appeared on coats of arms for over two centuries, fading from use by 1830. Modern science has since revealed a stranger truth about the real animal, that its closest living relatives are whales.

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1. The word was first recorded in English by 1398, from Latin. The translator John Trevisa worked on De Proprietatibus Rerum, an encyclopaedia by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, a thirteenth-century Franciscan friar, translated as 'On the Properties of Things'. He used the word to describe a number whose own parts, added together, made a total greater than itself.

2. An earlier form of the word was recorded as early as 1384, in the Wycliffite Bible's translation of the Gospel of Luke. By the early fifteenth century it had been reshaped, gaining an English ending, and borrowed a second time directly from Latin.

3. Behind the Latin word lay two parts, a prefix meaning 'over', and a verb meaning 'to flow'. Behind that verb lies a Proto-Indo-European root, *bhleu-, meaning 'to swell, or well up'. The same root gave English the word flux, meaning a constant state of flowing change.

4. FLUENT and BLOAT share the same root. FLUENT entered English in the 1580s, first describing water flowing freely, before being applied to someone who could speak well. BLOAT entered English in the 1660s, meaning to cause something to swell.

5. By the mid-nineteenth century the word had taken on a new meaning, describing women left unmarried because the general population had more women than men, a gap caused by male emigration and dangerous, often fatal, work conditions of the era. George Bernard Shaw, in 1911, noted that around a million British women faced this same statistical fate. By the twentieth century the word had settled into its now-familiar, gentler meaning.

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1. The word first entered English around 1300, in an anonymous medieval narrative written in an everyday language. Later, around 1395, Geoffrey Chaucer used the same word when translating a famous French allegorical poem, written by Guillaume de Lorris and later extended by Jean de Meun.

2. Old French first used the word around 1125, built on a Latin phrase meaning to write in a particular style. The French word carried two meanings, a plain spoken language, and a story.

3. Behind the Latin phrase lay the name of a city, a name whose own origin is uncertain. The ancient grammarian Servius linked it to an old name for the river Tiber, and a root meaning 'to flow'. The modern lexicographer Ernest Klein instead proposed it came from Etruscan, the language spoken in Italy before Latin, and unrelated to it entirely.

4. URBAN and ROBUST may share a distant connection to this word's deepest root. The philologist T.G. Tucker, in his Etymological Dictionary of Latin, proposed that it was built from two Latin words, one meaning 'city', the other meaning 'strength'. URBAN comes from the first, ROBUST from the second, though the theory remains disputed.

5. By the late sixteenth century the word named any invented tale, set far from ordinary life. John Dryden, in his 1668 comedy Sir Martin Mar-all, used it for an outright lie, having a character declare he'd not believe a word of it. By 1745 it had softened into something gentler, a sense of mystery and glamour, and by 1858 it named a shared emotion.

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1. The word was recorded in Scotland in 1578, formed from within English. John Rolland, a Scottish poet, used it in The Seven Sages, describing the fearsome anger of God.

2. Old Norse gave English half this word by around 1300, appearing in The Lay of Havelok the Dane, a poem describing all of England standing in terror of a Danish king. The second half, -sum, was already native to Old English, centuries before the two elements were joined together.

3. Behind the Old Norse agi, meaning ‘fear’, lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *agh-, meaning ‘to be afraid’. The same root gave Greek akhos, meaning ‘pain, or grief’.

4. AILMENT and SIMPLE share a distant root. AILMENT entered English in 1706, built from the older verb ail, meaning ‘to afflict’. SIMPLE entered English from Latin, meaning ‘onefold’, from a root meaning ‘one, together’.

5. By the twentieth century the word had drifted from its meaning of fear, and now described anything daunting, as in E.F. Schumacher's 1973 book Small Is Beautiful, on economics, which warned of the world's most pressing difficulties. By the early 1980s, American teenagers had claimed the word, using it for anything they liked, a usage captured in a 1982 script for the film Valley Girl. By 1987 it had also become a one-word exclamation on its own, used by Stephen King in his 1987 novel The Tommyknockers.

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1. The word was recorded in a 9th-century translation of the Latin Psalms into English, one of the oldest of its kind to survive. The earliest meaning was a low stool, or footstool.

2. Latin gave the word to the Germanic languages long before English took its modern shape. Around the year 1000, in the Blickling Homilies, a collection of Old English sermons, the word named the tables of the money changers, the very ones a furious Christ is said to have overturned in the temple.

3. Behind the Old English word lay a Latin word meaning 'a little bench'. Behind that lies a Proto-Indo-European root, *skambh-, meaning 'to prop up'. In ancient Sanskrit, the same root named a cosmic pillar said to hold up the sky.

4. This word has only one confirmed cognate, and even that one has changed. FOOTSTOOL was originally fotsceamel in Old English, built from 'foot' and 'sceamel', the element that became this word. Later, that second element was replaced with the unrelated word 'stool', leaving no trace of the original connection in the word as we use it today.

5. By the fifteenth century the word named entire streets of butchers, several of which still keep the word in their name in English towns today. York's own street of this name is now one of the best-preserved medieval shopping lanes in Europe. By 1548 the word's meaning had narrowed to the place where animals were slaughtered for meat. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his 1794 play The Fall of Robespierre, used the word figuratively for the wholesale slaughter of a city during a violent revolution. By the twentieth century the word had softened to meaning a chaotic mess.

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1. The word was recorded by the late fourteenth century, formed from within English. William Langland, in Piers Plowman, used it to describe men who were needy, urging that they be helped with charity.

2. Two Old English elements built the word, na, meaning 'no', and wiht, a noun meaning 'creature'. That second element was also used in Gothic, an early Germanic language.

3. Behind the noun 'creature' lies a disputed Proto-Indo-European root, *wekti-, meaning 'thing'. The linguist Dirk Boutkan argues the word has no confirmed ancestry beyond this point.

4. WIGHT and AUGHT share the same root. WIGHT was formed in Old English, naming an uncanny, supernatural creature. AUGHT entered English in the late twelfth century, meaning anything at all, a word Shakespeare and Milton both used interchangeably with a near-identical spelling.

5. By the mid-sixteenth century the word described promiscuous behaviour. Benjamin Franklin, in his own Autobiography, used it to describe a young woman who had become pregnant outside marriage. By the early seventeenth century the word had softened, describing mischief rather than impropriety. Emily Brontë, in 1847, repeated the word twice for extra emphasis, and it is still used today to reprimand bad behaviour.

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1. The word was recorded in English by 1611, formed from native Germanic roots. The lexicographer Randle Cotgrave, in A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, used it to describe a ball of yarn.

2. Formed within Old English rather than borrowed from another language, it drew on a Proto-Germanic root already in use before the Norman Conquest. The same root ran through Old Saxon and Dutch, each carrying its own form of the word for a rolled ball. John Gower used it in 1393, in Confessio Amantis, a major work of Middle English poetry, though the spelling in surviving editions has since been modernised from his own.

3. Behind the Germanic root, *kliwjo-, lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *gleu-, meaning to gather into a mass. The philologist Julius Pokorny connects this same root to gloutos, the Greek word for the rump.

4. CLOD and CLOUD share the same root. CLOD was formed in Old English, first meaning a lump of earth, before later meaning a foolish, dull-witted person. CLOUD was also formed in Old English, meaning a mass of rock, or a hill, only later shifting to name the shapes in the sky.

5. By the early seventeenth century the word named the thread that led a person safely out of a maze, or a labyrinth. Charlotte Brontë, writing in 1849, used the same word for a single piece of evidence, and by 1914 the New York World had created a new editorial feature around it.

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1. The word entered English around 1470, from Latin. The pilgrim William Wey used it in his Itineraries, an account of his travels to the Holy Land, describing a wilderness where Christ fasted, and his body suffered, for forty days.

2. Latin probably carried the word first, in the ninth century, then French by the end of the twelfth, and Italian by the fourteenth, before it settled into English. By 1630, in Italian, the word had taken on its most enduring modern sense, tied to the Venetian custom of holding ships offshore.

3. Behind the Latin word lay a number, forty, built from quattuor, an older word meaning 'four'. Behind that lies a Proto-Indo-European root, *kwetwer-, meaning 'four'. The same root gave Greek tessares, its word for four.

4. FORTNIGHT and SQUARE share the same root. FORTNIGHT was formed within English, a contraction of an Old English phrase meaning 'fourteen nights', preserving an ancient Germanic custom of counting time by nights rather than days. SQUARE entered English in the mid-thirteenth century, from Old French, first naming a carpenter's tool used for measuring right angles.

5. For centuries the word marked periods of forty days in English law and religion. In the early sixteenth century it named the forty days a widow could remain in her late husband's house before her inheritance was settled, a right William Blackstone later described in his Commentaries on the Laws of England. Samuel Pepys, in 1663, noted that ships were being held for only thirty days, not forty, remarking that this went against the meaning of the word. By 1743 the same period of forty days also marked a set penance a servant might owe for wrongdoing.

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