Etymology

off

O1F4F4

Today it means: In a direction away from the speaker or other reference point. Full definition →

Middle English of ← Old English of ← Proto-West Germanic *ab
Ask AI about its historyChatGPTClaudePerplexityGoogle AIGrok

The story

  1. Proto-Indo-European*h₂ep
  2. Proto-Indo-European*h₂epó
  3. Proto-Germanic*ab
  4. Proto-West Germanic*ab
  5. Old Englishæf
  6. Old Englishof
  7. Middle Englishof
  8. English todayoff

From Middle English of, from Old English of, af, æf (“from, off, away”), from Proto-West Germanic *ab, from Proto-Germanic *ab (“from”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂epo (“from, off, back”). Doublet of of. Cognates Cognate with Scots aff (“away, off”), Saterland Frisian oawe, ou (“from”), West Frisian ôf (“away, off”), Dutch af (“from, off”), German ab (“from, off”), German Low German, Luxembourgish of (“off”), Yiddish אָפּ (op, “off”), Danish, Icelandic af (“from, off”), Faroese, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk av (“off”), Swedish af, av (“off”), Gothic 𐌰𐍆 (af, “of, from”); and with Latin ab (“of, from, by”), Ancient Greek ἀπό (apó, “from”), and others.

Words from the same roots

Middle Englishof all →

ofa

Old Englishof all →

of

Proto-West Germanic*ab all →

of

Proto-Germanic*ab all →

ofebb

Proto-Indo-European*h₂epo all →

ofafghanovertpomeranianparsimonyaphorismpomaceab-apo-apricateoff-

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.