![]() This use then gave rise to the early nineteenth century adjective meaning 'unearthly', which then developed into modern English weird. The modern English usage actually developed from the Scots dialect of English, where beginning in the 14th century, to weird was used as a verb with the sense of 'to preordain by decree of fate'. To elucidate this, many editors of the play include a footnote associating the "Weird Sisters" with the Old English word wyrd or 'fate'. The weird sisters notably appear as the Three Witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth. the classical Fates, who in the Elizabethan period were detached from their classical background and given an English personification as fays. Adjectival use of wyrd developed in the 15th century, in the sense 'having the power to control destiny', originally in the name of the Weird Sisters, i.e. Wyrd is a noun formed from the Old English verb weorþan, meaning 'to come to pass, to become'. The same root is also found in * weorþ, with the notion of 'origin' or ' worth' both in the sense of 'connotation, price, value' and 'affiliation, identity, esteem, honour and dignity'. The Proto-Indo-European root is * wert- meaning 'to twist', which is related to Latin vertere 'turning, rotating', and in Proto-Germanic is * werþan- with a meaning 'to come to pass, to become, to be due'. ![]() ![]() Wyrd has cognates in Old Saxon wurd, Old High German wurt, Old Norse urðr, Dutch worden (to become), and German werden. The Old English term wyrd derives from a Proto-Germanic term * wurđíz. ![]() The word also appears in the name of the well where the Norns meet, Urðarbrunnr. The cognate term to wyrd in Old Norse is urðr, with a similar meaning, but also personified as a deity: Urðr (anglicized as Urd), one of the Norns in Norse mythology. The word is ancestral to Modern English weird, whose meaning has drifted towards an adjectival use with a more general sense of " supernatural" or " uncanny", or simply "unexpected". Wyrd is a concept in Anglo-Saxon culture roughly corresponding to fate or personal destiny. Poster for the Norwegian magazine Urd by Andreas Bloch and Olaf Krohn ![]()
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