Etymology

hug

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Today it means: A close embrace, especially when charged with an emotion such as affection, joy, relief, lust, anger, aggression, compassion, or the like, as opposed to being characterized by formality, equivocation or ambivalence (a half-embrace). Full definition →

Old Norse hugga ← Proto-Germanic *hugiz
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The story

  1. Proto-Germanic · derived from*hugiz“mind, thought, sense”
  2. Old Norse · derived fromhugga“to comfort, console”
  3. English todayhug

From earlier hugge (“to embrace, clasp with the arms”) (1560), probably representing a conflation of huck (“to crouch, huddle down”) and Old Norse hugga (“to comfort, console”), from hugr (“mind, heart, thought”), from Proto-Germanic *hugiz (“mind, thought, sense”), cognate with Icelandic hugga (“to comfort”), Old English hyġe (“thought”) (whence high (Etymology 2)).

Words from the same roots

Proto-Germanic*hugiz all →

HughHubert

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.