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I’ve talked before about how the parts of human experience that are most common to us all are the ones for which the history of a word describing that little bit of our common heritage goes back furthest. 

Word is one of those words.

Ever since people have been able to communicate verbally with one another we’ve had to have had words, and what we call these little pieces of audible communication has had a common name for a very long time.

Both the Oxford English Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary point to an Indo-European root wer.

People had been speaking to each other long before that but we’ve no way to tell if the word root for word went even further back.

Still, this is a pretty far reaching conclusion since Indo-European was perhaps seven thousand years ago and that’s about half way back to the invention of agriculture.  Classical Roman and Greek are only about a third of the way back to Indo-European on that timescale.

From that Indo-European word root wer sprouted related word words in all the precursor languages I regularly mention on podictionary.  But because the idea of what a word is was so natural to all the users along the way, instead of the Romans borrowing from the Greeks or the pre-Germanic people borrowing from the Romans, each language developed in parallel.

So our English word word traces back to Old English and Germanic roots.

But we also have the word verb that we got from French and Latin before it.  Verb has the same ultimate parentage as word, but evolved in parallel.

Similarly our word rhetoric came to us through Greek, but in Greek this word grew from the same Indo-European root and again along a parallel path.

The difference in meaning between word and rhetoric also points out the breadth of meaning of such a commonly understood concept.

Looking back at the Oxford English Dictionary I can tell you that for a word with only four letters the definitions in the OED do go on.

Just as an experiment I copied the text for the OED entry into a Word™ document and found that it runs to 32 pages with more than 20,000 words of text.  The subtle variations in meaning are mind boggling.

Of course a group of letters on a page is a word, and so is something I say to you.  But even in that there are shades of gray.

“Can I have a word with you?”

“Say the word.” and

“We had words with each other.”

all demonstrate how slippery this meaning can be.

The point is that for these oldest and most commonly understood words not only do they have the longest histories, but they also have the most number of minute distinctions and variations in meaning.

The very first citation the OED has for word is dated 873.

There are a few things that are unusual about this.  For one thing 873 is a bit more exact than most of the older citations.  Another unusual thing about this citation is that it is for the seventh definition, not the first; often a word’s oldest appearance comes first in the list of definitions.

The reason that the OED has pinned 873 as the first time this word was written down is that the document it is written down in is pretty unique.  It was the will of King Alfred the Great.

The reason this citation comes in at number seven is really due to the slipperiness of the meaning of the word word.

Usually the OED tries to list meanings in the historical order that they arose in English.  Because word had been kicking around for so long with so many subtleties in meaning, I guess the OED editors felt that although they couldn’t find written evidence of English use of some of these meanings earlier than King Alfred’s, they really were more basic, fundamental meanings and so got listed first.

Most of the first six definitions are to do with speaking, Alfred’s—number seven—is to do with a command or instruction.

I chose today’s word word in part because it comes into the title of my audio book, and my audio book is now available not only on CD from Amazon and other bookstores, but as a download at iTunes (click here) and Audible.com (click here).

The title is Global Wording – the Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English.