The word was first recorded in English by 1450, from French and Latin. It appears in a Middle English translation of Palladius’s De re Rustica, a Roman work on farming, in a line about tilling the land in certain places.
French had already used the word by the twelfth century, for farming and for a plot of farmland. English took it from French and Latin, and in 1483 William Caxton, translating the Golden Legend, used it for the worship of a god.
In Latin, the source word was a noun meaning ‘care’ and ‘training’. It was built on a verb meaning ‘to tend’, which traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *kwel-, ‘to revolve’.
COLONY and WHEEL come from that same root. COLONY entered English in the late fourteenth century, from Latin, for an ancient Roman settlement outside Italy, and goes back to a Latin word for a tenant farmer. WHEEL was already in Old English, for a circular frame turning on an axle.
