![]() ![]() 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. Related: Weirdly weirdness.Poster for the Norwegian magazine Urd by Andreas Bloch and Olaf Krohn They were portrayed as odd or frightening in appearance, as in "Macbeth" (and especially in 18th and 19th century productions of it), which led to the adjectival meaning "odd-looking, uncanny" (1815) "odd, strange, disturbingly different" (1820). The sense of "uncanny, supernatural" developed from Middle English use of weird sisters for the three Fates or Norns (in Germanic mythology), the goddesses who controlled human destiny. 1400, "having power to control fate," from wierd (n.), from Old English wyrd "fate, chance, fortune destiny the Fates," literally "that which comes," from Proto-Germanic *wurthiz (source also of Old Saxon wurd, Old High German wurt "fate," Old Norse urðr "fate, one of the three Norns"), from PIE *wert- "to turn, to wind," (source also of German werden, Old English weorðan "to become"), from root *wer- (2) "to turn, bend." For the sense development from "turning" to "becoming," compare phrase turn into "become." ![]()
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