Etymology

hearth

H4E1A1R1T1H4

Today it means: The place in a home where a fire is or was traditionally kept for home heating and for cooking, usually constituted by at least a hearthstone and often enclosed to varying degrees by any combination of reredos, fireplace, oven, smoke hood, or chimney. Full definition →

Middle English herth ← Old English heorþ ← Proto-West Germanic *herþ
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The story

  1. Proto-Indo-European · derived from*kerh₃-“heat; fire”
  2. Proto-Germanic · inherited from*herþaz
  3. Proto-West Germanic · inherited from*herþ
  4. Old English · inherited fromheorþ
  5. Middle English · inherited fromherth
  6. English todayhearth

From Middle English herth, herthe, from Old English heorþ, from Proto-West Germanic *herþ, from Proto-Germanic *herþaz, possibly from Proto-Indo-European *kerh₃- (“heat; fire”). Cognate with West Frisian hurd, Dutch haard, German Herd, Swedish härd. First attested in the Old English period. The modern spelling is from an Middle English/Early Modern English /hɛːrθ/, from earlier /heːrθ/, levelled from inflected forms with /rð/ where the vowel would have been lengthened. The reflex of this pronunciation was preserved in obsolete dialectal /ˈhɜɹθ/.

Words from the same roots

Old Englishheorþ all →

hearth-penny

Proto-Indo-European*kerh₃- all →

carbon

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.