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2022: Creating a Lexicon of Future
W is for Wyrd
Wyrd is a concept in Anglo-Saxon culture roughly corresponding to fate or personal destiny. The word is ancestral to Modern English weird, which retains its original meaning only dialectically.
The cognate term in Old Norse is urðr, with a similar meaning, but also personified as one of the Norns, Urðr (anglicized as Urd) and appearing in the name of the holy well Urðarbrunnr in Norse mythology.
Old English wyrd is a verbal noun formed from the verb weorþan, meaning “to come to pass, to become”. The term developed into the modern English adjective weird. Adjectival use develops in the 15th century, in the sense “having the power to control fate”, originally in the name of the Weird Sisters, i.e. the classical Fates, in the Elizabethan period detached from their classical background as fays, and most notably appearing as the Three Witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In many editions of the play, the editors include a footnote associating the “Weird Sisters” with Old English: wyrd or “fate”. From the 14th century, to weird was also used as a verb in Scots, in the sense of “to preordain by decree of fate”. Of note is the use of “weird” in Frank Herbert’s Dune to connote an ability to amplify or empower, e.g., certain words being used as “weirding words.”
The modern spelling weird first appears in Scottish and Northern English dialects in the 16th century and is taken up in standard literary English from the 17th century. The regular modern English form would…
