The word entered English in the late fourteenth century, from French and Latin. An anonymous translation of Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon, a historic account of the world completed around 1425, used it for Kenneth MacAlpin, the ninth-century king credited with uniting the Scots and Picts, when taking Pictish territory that was not his to hold.
French delivered the word into English, drawing on a Latin root already centuries old. Geoffrey Chaucer used it in The Merchant’s Tale, around 1395, warning that any counsellor who dared think his own judgement could outrank his lord’s, was a great fool.
Two parts built the Latin word, a prefix meaning 'before', and a verb meaning 'to take'. The verb was built from sus-, a form of sub- meaning 'up from under', and emere, also meaning 'to take'. Behind it all lies a Proto-Indo-European root, *em-, again, meaning 'to take', or 'to distribute'.
EXEMPT and REDEEM share the same distant root. EXEMPT entered English in the late fourteenth century, from Latin by way of French, meaning 'to be taken out', removed entirely from something. John Donne, the poet and Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, used it before his death in 1631 to describe men set apart from God, 'exempt out of the world'. REDEEM entered English from both French and Latin in the fourteenth century, first describing God delivering a soul from sin, later widening to the recovery of anything pledged or lost.
By the seventeenth century the word had settled into its familiar sense, taking something as true. John Locke used it in 1690, in his Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, admitting the furthest he could go on a difficult question was to accept it without full certainty. Charles Dickens used it in 1839, in Nicholas Nickleby, to describe what a reader might reasonably conclude about the character of Miss Squeers without being told outright.
