New Year, new decade. The word year is a decidedly Old English word.

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A year is the length of time for the seasons to go full circle. This is a pretty universal concept and because of that the word’s meaning has been particularly stable over time.

As with most Old English words year has a Germanic heritage appearing first as a recognizable English word around the year 960 as far as we can tell from documents that survive. But the concept of a repeating cycle of seasons certainly goes back more than 1050 years.

Unsurprisingly the word’s roots extend back into Indo-European and seem to be related to a number of other words in other branches of Indo-European that all refer to some unit of time, if not a year.

In Greek the Indo-European root developed into hora meaning a “time of year,” a “season.”

In Russian jar meaning “spring” but in Serbian “summer.”

According to John Ayto’s book Word Origins the Indo-European base might have meant “go” so that the family of words took their sense of time from the concept of time marching on.

It’s one thing to know that when summer is over it will come again next year. But weather is fickle and you can’t plan when to plant your crops or when to follow your herds based only on the weather.

People who spent time gazing at the sky at night noticed that a more exact measure of how far along any given year was, might be had based on which stars were showing.

In very rough terms the sun moves across the sky during the day at the same pace as the stars move across it at night.

Over the course of a year the sun rises higher in the sky during summer and dips down lowest at midday in the winter. But unless you have some sort of measuring device it’s hard to be sure if it’s at its highest point today or if that will come next week, or maybe next month.

Much more accurate is to watch the night sky because you can recognize patterns in the stars and note which ones are there and which ones aren’t. They appear to shift in their nightly routine at the same rate as the sun bobbing up and down with the seasons.

The ancients identified twelve patterns in the sky by which they measured the progress of a year. From these we are left the legacy of the twelve signs of the zodiac.

The word horoscope has that “time” related, Indo-European inspired hora in there and means “time watcher.”