The word entered English in 1626, from Latin. The clergyman Thomas Aylesbury used it in a sermon on the Passion of Christ, describing the King of the Jews as holding his power only by the favour of another, and at another's pleasure.
It came directly from Latin, with an English ending added. In French the word had taken on a second meaning by 1618, describing something exposed to risk, more than half a century before English gained that same sense.
Behind the Latin word lay a noun meaning 'request'. Behind that lies a Proto-Indo-European root, *prek-, meaning 'to ask'. The same root gave Old English a word meaning 'to ask a question', related to the modern German word 'fragen'.
PRAY and PRAYER share the same root. PRAY entered English in the early thirteenth century, from Old French, meaning 'to beg'. PRAYER entered English around the same time, from the very same Latin word behind this word, an 'act of devotion'.
By the nineteenth century, Sir Walter Scott was using the word to describe a dizzy path along the edge of a precipice. And in 1919 The Times (London) used the same word to describe an unsteady seat on the back of a motorcycle.
