weak

Picture a branch bending in the wind rather than snapping: that physical yielding is the ancient image behind weak. The word traveled into English through Old Norse veikr, then appeared around 1300 in Middle English as waik and related spellings. Its proposed Indo-European ancestor is reconstructed in two slightly different ways—*weik- and *weyg-—but both point toward bending, turning, or yielding, so the underlying metaphor is wonderfully consistent. The same Germanic family produced Dutch week and German weich, both meaning “soft,” while weakling was coined by William Tyndale in the 1520s as a translation modeled on Luther’s German Weichling. Even grammar borrowed the contrast: a “weak” verb changes by adding a regular ending, while a “strong” verb changes its vowel—so English keeps an old battle between yielding and resisting inside its verbs.