Etymon #12
A leash, inside
Borrowed from Portuguese through French, the word entered English in 1578, in a legal petition about hampering creditors. Its original sense was nothing to do with what the word now describes: it named a kind of restraint.
The word's path runs back through three Romance languages. French gave it to English in the sixteenth century, after taking it from Spanish, which had taken it from Portuguese. The Portuguese verb is thought to derive from a root meaning 'to put a cord on, to restrain an animal by a leash’, though etymologists remain uncertain about the deeper origin. John Dryden used it in 1668 in Of Dramatick Poesie, complaining that the French do not 'cumber themselves with too much Plot'. By then the sense had begun to shift from physical restraint to mental difficulty, but the modern meaning was still nearly a century away.
The earliest meaning was external restraint. The Portuguese root verb described what a herdsman did to a wandering animal: a cord around the neck, a leash to the post, the beast brought to a halt. To suffer it was to be tied up against one's will, kept from going where one wished.
The same Romance prefix appears in English words including EMBARGO and EMBROIL. All three carry the ancient sense of being held back or tangled up.
