The word was recorded by the late fourteenth century, formed from within English. William Langland, in Piers Plowman, used it to describe men who were needy, urging that they be helped with charity.
Two Old English elements built the word, na, meaning 'no', and wiht, a noun meaning 'creature'. That second element was also used in Gothic, an early Germanic language.
Behind the noun 'creature' lies a disputed Proto-Indo-European root, *wekti-, meaning 'thing'. The linguist Dirk Boutkan argues the word has no confirmed ancestry beyond this point.
WIGHT and AUGHT share the same root. WIGHT was formed in Old English, naming an uncanny, supernatural creature. AUGHT entered English in the late twelfth century, meaning anything at all, a word Shakespeare and Milton both used interchangeably with a near-identical spelling.
By the mid-sixteenth century the word described promiscuous behaviour. Benjamin Franklin, in his own Autobiography, used it to describe a young woman who had become pregnant outside marriage. By the early seventeenth century the word had softened, describing mischief rather than impropriety. Emily Brontë, in 1847, repeated the word twice for extra emphasis, and it is still used today to reprimand bad behaviour.
