An Old English word, first recorded around 950 AD. The monk Aldred added handwritten translations line by line above the Latin text of the Lindisfarne Gospels, a manuscript of the four Gospels created by the monk Eadfrith on a tidal island off the Northumberland coast, in the northeast of England, around 715 AD. Among Aldred's translations was this word. Its meaning then was entirely religious.
Made in England, this word never borrowed from another language. Instead it grew from others in the earliest period of the language. As it passed through Middle English its spelling shifted. The Ancrene Riwle, a thirteenth century guide written for female religious recluses, used an earlier form of it. By 1460 the spelling had settled closer to what it is today.
One of the words it grew from traces back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning whole, uninjured, and of good omen. In the ancient world, to be sacred was to be set apart and kept whole.
HALLOWEEN and HEALTH share the same ancient root. HALLOWEEN takes its name from All Hallows' Eve, the night before All Saints' Day, when the hallowed dead were honoured. HEALTH came from Old English, naming the condition of being whole and sound in body. Both trace back to the same ancient root as this word, the one that lies behind the sacred and the sound.
By the fourteenth century the word had begun to shed its purely religious meaning. A time set apart for God was becoming a time apart from work. The two senses pulled apart slowly, until the pronunciation itself divided, one form kept the sacred meaning, the other became more informal. In 1871 Sir John Lubbock introduced a law giving English workers their first statutory period of rest, which was nicknamed ‘St Lubbock’s Days’. A word that had once named a sacred duty now named a legal entitlement.
