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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
