The word was first recorded in English, in its modern form, by 1548, from Latin. It appears in an English edition of the Dutch scholar Erasmus's work on the New Testament, which a royal order required every parish church in England to keep, describing a way of subverting a commandment.
French had already used the word by the twelfth century. English had borrowed it from Latin in Old English, and borrowed it again from French by about 1300, in an older spelling. One of its first English senses was flattery.
In Greek, the source word meant 'the tongue', and then 'a foreign or obscure word'. The origin of the Greek word is uncertain, though one theory ties it to a Proto-Indo-European root, *glogh-, meaning 'thorn', which may also lie behind a word for the barb of an arrow.
EPIGLOTTIS and POLYGLOT come from the Athenian form of the same Greek word as this one. EPIGLOTTIS took its present form in the 1610s, from Late Latin, for the flap that covers the windpipe when we swallow. POLYGLOT entered English in the 1640s, from Greek, for someone who speaks or writes many languages.
In 1837 the historian Henry Hallam credited Irnerius, a medieval law teacher, with starting the practice of adding it to the margins of the law books. Today it still describes a few words set beside a hard word.
