The word was recorded in a 9th-century translation of the Latin Psalms into English, one of the oldest of its kind to survive. The earliest meaning was a low stool, or footstool.
Latin gave the word to the Germanic languages long before English took its modern shape. Around the year 1000, in the Blickling Homilies, a collection of Old English sermons, the word named the tables of the money changers, the very ones a furious Christ is said to have overturned in the temple.
Behind the Old English word lay a Latin word meaning 'a little bench'. Behind that lies a Proto-Indo-European root, *skambh-, meaning 'to prop up'. In ancient Sanskrit, the same root named a cosmic pillar said to hold up the sky.
This word has only one confirmed cognate, and even that one has changed. FOOTSTOOL was originally fotsceamel in Old English, built from 'foot' and 'sceamel', the element that became this word. Later, that second element was replaced with the unrelated word 'stool', leaving no trace of the original connection in the word as we use it today.
By the fifteenth century the word named entire streets of butchers, several of which still keep the word in their name in English towns today. York's own street of this name is now one of the best-preserved medieval shopping lanes in Europe. By 1548 the word's meaning had narrowed to the place where animals were slaughtered for meat. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his 1794 play The Fall of Robespierre, used the word figuratively for the wholesale slaughter of a city during a violent revolution. By the twentieth century the word had softened to meaning a chaotic mess.
Eight letters.
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