What is the oldest word in the english language?

Answer 1

I'm afraid this is a completely nonsensical question. At every time, every human being has spoken a complete language with tens of thousands of words. They didn't start small and build up; there weren't any primitive languages with smaller vocabularies.

Every language has always had words for I, you, see, hear, earth, sky, walk, run, when, who, and so on and so on, and every language ever spoken in England has had words for local features such as river, snow, beech, holly, thrush, robin.

From time to time words are replaced. The Old English for 'mountain' and 'river' were replaced by the French-derived words we use now, for example. Sometimes we can see replacements happening further back: the Old English words that gave us folk, blood, hand, and quite a few others don't have corresponding related words outside the Germanic group, so they must have been replaced a couple of thousand years ago.

But almost anything that has survived from Old English is, effectively, equally old, and that's the vast majority of our core vocabulary.

Answer 2

The oldest word in the English language is "town"

Answer 3

I, is the oldest word in the English language.

Answer 4

How could you tell? The modern English language derived from Middle English, which derived from Old English, which derived from Anglo-Saxon dialects spoken in Northern Germany. And as you go back the vocabulary gets more and more different from modern English and loses the large amount of French/Latin vocabulary we have. You might as well ask how long a piece of string is. The 200 most widely used English words are apparently all old Anglo-Saxon words, so probably one of those.

I nominate f*ck and c*nt, which despite what a lot of Americans seem to think, are very ancient European swear words, not recent American inventions.

Answer 5

the word old is the oldest word in english language.

Answer 6

The oldest word in any language could be "a".

Answer 7

a good reference for this, if you can get your hands on it (best through a library) is the complete unabridged Oxford English Dictionary. It's about 25 or 26 volumes and shows all literary references for every word in the english language, from the first to the most recent significant entry, including changes in spelling, changes in usage etc. i remember seeing about 10 pages for the word 'the' - pretty mindblowing!

current issue is 3rd edition, 4th edition due in 2015.

incidentally, the most commonly used word in english is 'thing' :)

Answer 8

That's hard to say, because English is derived from German, as well as several other languages such as Latin. There was a time when what was considered English was closer to German than modern-day English.

The oldest word? I have no clue.

Answer 9

Sheeyit!

Seriously, probably the same as in EVERY language. Some variation of Mama. Mma. Ammah. Easy for an infant to verbalize.

Answer 10

don't know about the oldest but the biggest is... IF... and the biggest sentence is.. WHAT IF...

no i would think some form of mum or dad