Etymology

uncouth

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Today it means: Unfamiliar, strange, foreign. Full definition →

Middle English uncouth ← Old English uncūþ ← Proto-West Germanic *unkunþ
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The story

  1. Proto-Germanic · inherited from*unkunþaz“unknown”
  2. Proto-West Germanic · inherited from*unkunþ
  3. Old English · inherited fromuncūþ“unknown; unfamiliar; strange”
  4. Middle English · inherited fromuncouth
  5. English todayuncouth

From Middle English uncouth, from Old English uncūþ (“unknown; unfamiliar; strange”), from Proto-West Germanic *unkunþ, from Proto-Germanic *unkunþaz (“unknown”), equivalent to un- + couth. The modern pronunciation does not show /aʊ/, the usual development of the Middle English vowel from the Great Vowel Shift. It is usually explained as a pronunciation taken from Northern English dialects, which did not undergo the diphthongization of the vowel.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.