Etymon #28
Orderly Viking entry
The word entered English in the mid-thirteenth century from Old Norse, carried into the language through the Norse-speaking communities of northern and eastern England. Its earliest recorded use appears in the Genesis & Exodus, a Middle English poem composed c1250, where it described searching a person for something stolen. The Norse original meant something more orderly than what the word suggests today.
From Old Norse the word passed directly into Middle English, arriving with a specific legal meaning intact. In later use its spelling was probably nudged by a familiar English word for the plundering of a city.
The Old Norse source was built from two elements. The first named a house or dwelling. The second was a verb meaning to seek or to search. Put together they named a precise and legally recognised act, entering another person's home to look for stolen goods.
The same Old Norse root produced two familiar English words by different paths. SEEK descends from the same ancient verb as the second element of the source word, the act of searching or looking for something. RAMSHACKLE descends directly from this word itself, via an older form meaning to search roughly or carelessly.
In its first two centuries in English the word kept close to its legal origins. By the time Chaucer used it in the Knight's Tale, composed c1385, it had shifted. His soldiers were picking through the bodies of the dead on a battlefield, stripping them of armour and clothing. Order had left the word behind.
