The word entered English in 1572, from Latin. Its earliest recorded sense meant vulnerable and exposed to harm. Robert Harrison's translation Of Ghostes, from the work of the Swiss theologian Ludwig Lavater, used it to describe which type of men were most susceptible to supernatural encounters.
It came directly from Latin, with no other language standing between. The philosopher William Wollaston used it in 1722 to describe something answerable to no higher power. Before his death in 1774, the writer Oliver Goldsmith, author of The Vicar of Wakefield, used it to review another writer's work, judging it guilty of a serious fault.
The Latin word was built from two parts, a prefix meaning against, or toward, and a noun meaning hurt, or injury. Behind that noun lies a Proto-Indo-European root, *nek-, meaning death.
INNOCENT and NUISANCE share the same distant root as this word. INNOCENT entered English in the late fourteenth century, from Latin, built from a prefix meaning not, and a word meaning harmful, the two together naming someone free of any wrongdoing. NUISANCE arrived through French, from a verb meaning to hurt or harm, and for centuries named any kind of injury before narrowing to something merely irritating.
By the mid-nineteenth century the word had settled into its modern, harsher meaning. The poet Edward FitzGerald wrote in 1841 that a fellow writer, Thomas Carlyle, had become genuinely disliked the moment he became popular. In 1944 the novelist Evelyn Waugh joked that the harder he tried to make himself disagreeable to a particular acquaintance, the more that man seemed to like him.
