forth

Picture an Anglo-Saxon speaker pointing toward the horizon and saying forþ: not merely “there,” but onward, farther, keep moving. The word reaches back to the Proto-Indo-European root *per-, a tiny verbal arrow meaning “forward,” which also lies behind fore, far, first, and further. In Old English, forþ could mean “forward,” “out into view,” or even “continually”; the phrase “and so forth” was already in use in that period, long before it became the polite way to stop listing things. Dutch voort and German fort still preserve close Germanic cousins, like linguistic signposts left along the same road. Whenever you say forth, you are giving motion a direction: not backward, not sideways—out there, onward.