The word was first recorded in English by 1598, from Latin. It appears in an English translation of a French surgeon's manual, The Frenche Chirurgerye, in a passage comparing the pains of dysentery.
Latin had already used the word by the fourteenth century, and English took it straight from Latin. By 1602 Ben Jonson's comedy Poetaster had a poet describe his coat of arms as a bloody toe between three thorns, using the word for them.
In Latin, the verb behind it meant 'to prick', and figuratively 'to vex' or 'to grieve'. English borrowed the verb's 'pricking' form. The verb traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *peuk-, which meant the same and may also lie behind a Greek word for a boxer.
COMPUNCTION and PUNCH are built on the same Latin verb as this word. COMPUNCTION entered English in the mid-fourteenth century, from Old French, meaning remorse for wrongdoing. PUNCH entered English in the late fourteenth century, from Old French, as a pointed tool for making holes.
