The word entered English from Latin around the eighth century, before the Norman Conquest. Its earliest recorded English use named an ancient unit of weight. It later named a sum of money. John Wycliffe used it in his 1384 Bible translation to name the coins a master gave his servants.
It reached English by two routes. The first came directly from Latin, which had taken it from Greek. Plautus, the Roman playwright, used it in his comedies around 200 BC, to describe large sums of money. The second route travelled through Old French, which had taken the Latin word in a different direction, using it to mean inclination or desire, arriving in English in the late thirteenth century. Dante used this sense in his Inferno, written around 1308. Behind both lay Greek, and behind Greek a Babylonian unit of weight whose name the Greeks borrowed and made their own.
In Greek it named a balance, a pair of scales. The instrument that measured gold, silver, and other metals. Behind the Greek lay a Proto-Indo-European root, tele-, meaning to lift. It sent branches across the ancient world. In Latin it became the act of lifting something up in praise.
ATLAS and EXTOL share the same ancient root as this word. ATLAS was the Titan condemned to bear the weight of the heavens on his shoulders. His name traditionally meant the bearer, from the same ancient root. EXTOL came from Latin extollere, from the same root, meaning to raise someone high in praise. One lifts the sky. The other lifts a person in words.
Its modern sense grew from a Biblical parable. In Matthew 25, a master gives three servants coins before a journey. Two invest and multiply. The third buries his in the ground and is condemned for it on the master's return. Medieval scholars read the parable as an instruction. God gives each person gifts and expects them to be used, not buried. By the mid-fifteenth century the word had shifted from the coins to the gifts themselves. John Lydgate, a Benedictine monk and poet at Bury St Edmunds, used it in this new sense around 1430.
