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“Weird” is a weird word
gist
Colin Gorrie traces English weird from Old English wyrd ‘fate’ through a near-extinction after the Norman Conquest, survival in Scots, and a chain of literary accidents that put it back into English. French fortune and destiny, then Latin fate, made the native word superfluous in the south. Holinshed still used weird sisters for the Fates; Shakespeare kept the phrase without the gloss; compositors set weyward; Theobald restored weird. Later readers filled the blank with ‘eerie’, then ‘odd’, and the adjective became one of English’s most common words.
ideas
- Wyrd named fate, not oddness. Old English wyrd meant ‘that which happens’, and poets used it at the bleakest moments of Beowulf and The Wanderer.
- Loanwords almost erased it. After 1066, French fortune and destiny, then Latin fate, made native wyrd superfluous in the south; it survived in Scots as weird.
- The spelling is Scots. Weird looks irregular in English because it follows Scots spelling, not the ee, ie, or ea pattern of weed, field, and beard.
- A literary chain saved the word. Holinshed’s weird sisters, Shakespeare’s unexplained reuse, the First Folio’s weyward, and Theobald’s emendation put weird back into English.
- Obscurity invited semantic drift. With no clear meaning outside Macbeth, readers took weird as ‘eerie’, then ‘odd’, and its frequency later exploded.
quotes
“So wyrd is ‘that which happens’.”
“Weird is spelled weirdly because it follows the rules of Scots, not English.”
“When Shakespeare took this scene into Macbeth, he kept the phrase weird sisters but left out the explanation.”
“That makes weird one of the most common words in the English language.”