The word came from Old English. The Corpus Glossary is a Latin-Old English catalogue of words compiled around 800 AD. It gives this word as the Old English equivalent of the Latin words for success and a favourable outcome.
Unlike many English words, this one was never borrowed. It did not arrive through Latin, French, or any other language. It was passed directly from Proto-Germanic into Old English. The same root gave Old Saxon, Dutch, and Old High German their own words for success and prosperity.
Behind Germanic lay something older. A Proto-Indo-European root meaning to flourish and prosper sent branches in different directions. One of those branches passed into Latin as spes, the Latin word for hope.
DESPAIR and DESPERATE both come from the same ancient root. DESPAIR came from Latin desperare, built from de- meaning without, and sperare, to hope, the condition of being entirely without hope. DESPERATE came from the same Latin verb, describing a person so far beyond hope that all caution has been abandoned. This word grew from the same root, which originally meant only to prosper and succeed.
The prosperity sense survived into the nineteenth century but was fading, apart from in Scotland. By the twentieth century the word had shed its original meaning almost entirely. The Watergate hearings of 1973 and 1974 were watched by millions of Americans as President Nixon's administration unravelled. Six days after Nixon resigned, the New York Times noted that witnesses at the hearings had been using the word in a new sense, meaning fully informed and briefed on a situation.
