The noun entered English in the late fourteenth century, coming through Anglo-Norman and Old French, both drawing on Latin. Its earliest recorded English use appears in a Scottish charter of c1380, describing the transfer of lands. A generation later John Trevisa used it in his translation of Higden's Polychronicon, in a passage dealing with ecclesiastical law. The Latin root carried a meaning more physical than what the word suggests today.

It reached English through Anglo-Norman and Old French, from a Latin verb meaning 'to give back'. Old French used it from as early as 1223. The Latin root was built on the act of marking, of making a visible impression, though the word's modern use would not suggest this.

Behind the word lay a Latin verb built from two elements. The first was a prefix meaning 'back' or 'opposite'. The second meant 'to mark'. Together they described a precise action from the world of accounting, entering a mark on the opposite side of the ledger, cancelling what had been recorded there before.

That same Latin root has left traces across English. SIGNAL came from the same source, the idea of a mark that carries meaning across a distance. So did CONSIGN, the act of marking goods over to another person's care. Both carry the original sense of marking.

In its first century in English the word belonged to lawyers and clergymen. Thomas à Kempis changed that. His De Imitatione Christi, translated into English around 1500, used it for something altogether more inward, the surrender of the self to God. By the 1640s it had moved to mean the quiet acceptance of what cannot be changed.

Etymon #29

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