Paint arose in Middle English from French, or as the latest update to The Oxford English Dictionary puts it from Anglo-Norman, a refinement in definition of the language that was being spoken by the descendants of the Norman Invaders from 1066.

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They would have been speaking a form of French and by the time paint popped out into the written record in 1275 that French had mixed with Old English to form Middle English.

That timeline gives 200 years or so for people to have mixed the two languages but the case of the word paint shows not only that this mix could have happened faster, it also shows us a little bit about how ancient documents are interpreted.

The Oxford English Dictionary indicates the year 1275 as the latest that this word paint might have first appeared, but they also list 1216 as a possible date.

The reason for this is that the word is first cited in something called The Argument Between the Owl and the Nightingale which is a poem supposedly relating exactly what the title describes.

It now exists in only two old manuscripts and scholars have to guess at how old the poem itself might be.

The strongest evidence is a reference to King Henry. But which King Henry?

And was the reference a literal one or metaphorical one because in the context of a story about two birds sitting in the trees arguing with one another one can’t be too sure anything is literal.

Thus is woven the tenuous dating of first citations.

The birds certainly were arguing. The citation for the word paint relates to the nightingale telling the owl how hateful and ugly she is:

“your body is squat, your neck is scrawny, your head is bigger than the rest of you put together; your eyes are black as coal, and as big as if they were painted with woad.”

Woad is a kind of dye.

With this cutting remark it is appropriate that when we look back beyond the French etymology of paint we find Latin and ultimately an Indo-European root and that Indo-European root meant “to cut.”

The development seems to have been that people used the word “to cut” to refer to making decorations with cut marks, that this later came simply to mean “to decorate” and later still “to decorate with colors.”