Etymon #6
Grief before heat
Around 1175, an Augustinian canon from south Lincolnshire named Orm wrote the Ormulum, a vast verse commentary on the Gospels. The poem holds one of the first written uses of a word for inward suffering. It surfaces again around 1250 in the Owl and the Nightingale, an anonymous debate poem. Eight centuries on, few who use it daily would guess what it first meant.
The word arrived with Norse-speaking settlers, the Scandinavians who held the north and east of England from the ninth century, in the territory the Anglo-Saxons called the Danelaw. Old Norse and Old English were close cousins then, near enough that a settler and a local could broadly understand each other, and words crossed easily between them. In the colloquial speech of Orm's own country it took hold, until it no longer sounded foreign at all.
The original sense was grief, an affliction that weighs on a person from within. Beneath it lay an older root meaning tightness, as though the feeling closed around the chest and would not loosen. The emotion was named from the body: a physical narrowing felt before it was ever a state of mind.
The same root reached English by another road, through Latin. It gave us ANGINA and ANXIOUS, both from a verb meaning to choke. They still carry the old sense of constriction their Norse cousin left behind.
