Wing IV · Semantic lineage
truth
Oldest known meaning — faithfulness, loyalty, a promise kept.
faithfulness → loyalty → conformity to fact → reality itself
Excavation timeline
How the meaning shifted
Etymological strata
Layers of descent
- *treuwiþōProto-Germanic · reconstructed
Proto-Germanic — good faith, fidelity
- trēowþOld English · before 900
Old English — faithfulness, a pledge, fidelity
Truth was first about people keeping faith, not facts being correct.
- trewtheMiddle English · c. 1300
Middle English — loyalty; also accuracy
- truthModern English · 1560s
English — conformity with fact; the real state of things
Constellation
Descendants & cognates
Inner ring — modern descendants of the same root. Outer ring — cognates in sister languages. Gold descendants link to their specimen.
Semantic drift
How the sense moved
Truth and trust are the same seed. The oldest truth was relational — being true to someone, as a knight is true to a vow — long before it meant matching reality. The shift from 'keeping faith' to 'matching fact' tracks a culture moving from a world held together by oaths to one measured by evidence.
Metaphorical expansion
Where the word reaches now
Cultural sediment
The worldview inside the word
The word still betrays its origin: we speak of being 'true to' a person or principle, a loyalty-truth older than the factual one.
Related descendants
Words from the same root
Sources
Confidence & citations
Lineage confidence · Well attested
- · Online Etymology Dictionary
- · OED, s.v. truth, troth