The word was recorded in Scotland in 1578, formed from within English. John Rolland, a Scottish poet, used it in The Seven Sages, describing the fearsome anger of God.
Old Norse gave English half this word by around 1300, appearing in The Lay of Havelok the Dane, a poem describing all of England standing in terror of a Danish king. The second half, -sum, was already native to Old English, centuries before the two elements were joined together.
Behind the Old Norse agi, meaning ‘fear’, lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *agh-, meaning ‘to be afraid’. The same root gave Greek akhos, meaning ‘pain, or grief’.
AILMENT and SIMPLE share a distant root. AILMENT entered English in 1706, built from the older verb ail, meaning ‘to afflict’. SIMPLE entered English from Latin, meaning ‘onefold’, from a root meaning ‘one, together’.
By the twentieth century the word had drifted from its meaning of fear, and now described anything daunting, as in E.F. Schumacher's 1973 book Small Is Beautiful, on economics, which warned of the world's most pressing difficulties. By the early 1980s, American teenagers had claimed the word, using it for anything they liked, a usage captured in a 1982 script for the film Valley Girl. By 1987 it had also become a one-word exclamation on its own, used by Stephen King in his 1987 novel The Tommyknockers.
