What is the oldest common English word?

Question

I'm trying to formalize What is the oldest still-in-use English word? which was closed as vague.

Consider the "age" of a word to be the length of time since it was first used with the (more-or-less) the current meaning and pronunciation.

Obviously, there are lots of words date from Classical Antiquity: Coitus, agenda, and terminus are among thousands of words that would mean the same to Julius Caesar as they do to us.
[Assignment for the under-worked: write a logical, grammatical English sentence consisting entirely of such words; extra credit if it also makes sense in Latin.]

There are even words preserved untouched from ancient Greece (echo, academe, halcyon, stasis).

Are there any word that pre-dates those, such as some word that a Mycenaean potter or a Hittite horseman would say that, I don't know, Matt Lauer would understand perfectly?

My guess is ma, meaning mother, but I have no proof.

Answer 1

One candidate would be the Hittite word for "water", which was "watar" or "wadar" (there are different views on exactly what the consonant was).

Answer 2

I think your question needs a bit more work to make it answerable. I'll discuss the difficulties briefly:

Does a word like pharaoh count? The OED gives the etymology "post-classical Latin Pharaon-, Pharao (Vulgate) < Hellenistic Greek Φαραώ (Septuagint) < Hebrew parʿōh < Egyptian pr-ʿo great house" so it must be three thousand years old at least. But many words have etymological ancestors of similar antiquity, for example white is from the Indo-European root *kwidnos, *kwitnos and is likely at least as old. So what counts as a "still-in-use English word?"

Although it's very plausible that ma is ancient (see Larry Trask, Where do mama/papa words come from?), the OED's first citation for the word in English is from 1823 ("E. Moor Suffolk Words at Pa, It is sometimes rather comic to hear a great chuckle-headed lout—paa-ing his father—or maa-ing his mother.") Searching for antedatings is hard because of the many false positives (for example MA meaning "Master of Arts"). So if you find an antedating, be sure to submit it to the OED!

Answer 3

According to a press release from Reading University, "I", "we", "one", "two" and "three" are among the oldest.

Based on computer models of Indo-European language evolution, they estimate these words to be at least 10,000 years old and possibly as much as 30,000 years.

Answer 4

Linguistically, that's really not a very good question. A word is not a concrete term, but rather a generalization made by speakers (and not linguists) to distinguish speech units on a pretty shady basis, the most solid of which is actually the writing system (i.e. "a word is what comes between two spaces"), thus, the phrase "cannot" will constitute one word, and the phrase "can not" two. Attempts to use a different basis will most likely drag you into the grey areas of the language, which linguists have a hard time with, such as determining what makes a 'set phrase', and whether it should count as one word or two.

That's not all — other than the elusiveness of the term word in the current language state (synchronous application), there's also the issue of language change over time and between dialects, not less elusive: there's no real way to compare words in ancient Greek or Hebrew to one another or to English words and say 'these are the same words'.

Someone above suggested a rather plausible test of recognition, however it probably still wouldn't do for a scientific test. A few reasons are:

1. There's no real telling how the words sounded in the ancient languages.
2. It's often hard to trace the route of a word between distant languages (e.g. if English got it from Greek, from Proto Indo-European, from Latin, etc.).
3. Even if we did know the old pronunciations, it would almost never be exactly the same, and often less resembling than it seems in the first place. Mind that aside from the consonants and the vowels there are also differences in stress and intonation.

So, although from many aspects it is quite plausible to compare language to a biological system in terms of evolution, it's still not possible to determine 'the oldest word in a language'. A word is new every time it is uttered, and a language changes every day — we can call it by any name we please, but English today is not the same English as yesterday.