We know that the word word can sometimes be a synonym for promise, as in:
to mean:
And I haven’t seen any other sentence structures that word is used to mean promise in them.
My question: When did word become a synonym for promise for the first time?
From the online resource, Middle English Compendium
- word
(a) A command, an edict, a royal decree, etc.; an expressed request, (someone’s) bidding; hunt. & hawk. a call or command to a hound or falcon; wordes of livere, ?instructions, directions; ?an authorized order; (b) an assurance, a guarantee; (someone’s) pledge, promise, word of honor; a statement of intent; also, an oath; holden (kepen) ~; (c) a prophecy, prediction; (d) a boast; blustering; also, a threat; gret (heigh, proud) wordes; (e) a word or series of words used in ritual, prayer, incantation; also, a prayer, an incantation.
Quotation
- Ðet wæs first seo kyning Wulfere þe þet feostnode first mid his worde & siððon mid his fingre ge wrat on Cristes mel.
Source:Peterborough Chronicle, a1121
A very rough translation
GEdgar's answer which cites an earlier instance dates from 1008. I found, what appears a trustworthy translation, in a series of papers dedicated to Alfred the Great entitled Alfred the Wise printed in 1997
The similarly confirmative, alliterating word-pair word and wedd occurs twice in the laws: King Æthelred’s code of 1008 [V Atr.5], goðence word & wedd þe he God betœhte ‘let (every monk) consider the word and pledge that he gave to God’, and similarly King Æthelred’s Laws issued at King’s Enham [VI Atr. 3a], both Wulfstanian. It occurs in a homily not now attributed to Wulfstan: and gif ge nyllað healdan eower word and eower wedd, ge þonne beoð adilegode of ealra lifigendra bocum ‘and if you will not keep your word and your pledge, then you will be blotted out from the books of all the living’. It occurs once in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in the annal for 1014, versions C, D, and E: & man þa fulne freondscipe gefœstnode mid worde & mid wedde on œgþre healfe ‘And then a complete compact of friendship was confirmed with word and with pledge on either side’[…]
When did “word” become a synonym of “promise” for the first time?
This a question for historical linguistics, and such questions are usually unanswerable because the ideas of a language might actually predate a language itself and languages themselves don't, strictly speaking, have beginnings and ends. If Modern English has the expression, "to give one's word", then it seems Middle and Old English do too, which then begs the question is it proto-Germanic? For instance, if a speaker of the Bokmål, uses the same construction to communicate the same meaning, then likely there has never been English where 'to give a word' was never used, and that's because there is not strict dividing line between proto-Germanic, Frisian, Old English, Middle English, etc. In fact, dialects of languages are difficult to define as dialects in opposition to distinct languages, a fact that Scots and Veneto speakers might realize given their often contested statuses as distinct languages. The fact that OED has examples going back to old English doesn't necessarily mean that the idiom began there. It may very well go back to the Romans, in which case on Latin Stack Exchange, you might be able to ask the same question and date the idiom back to the beginning of Latin. And even then, who is to say that it wasn't used well before its first known archaeological appearance? The idiom may have been used by the putative speakers of PIE.
"To keep one's word" ...
For this sense, Oxford English Dictionary (subscription required) has examples back to Old English
Gif ge nyllað healdan eower word and eower wedd, ge þonne beoð adilegode of ealra lifigendra bocum.
tchrist points out this definition... "A promise, a pledge, an undertaking; a guarantee. Almost always with possessive." This also has quotations back to Old English. Here is a more recent one from 1393:
It sit wel every wiht To kepe his word in trowthe upryht.
