became

Became is the simple past tense of become, which descends from Old English becuman. The Old English form combined be-, a prefix with intensifying or completive force, and cuman, meaning to come. The compound becuman meant to come to a place, to arrive, and by extension to happen or occur. The Venerable Bede used it in the 8th century; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle used it throughout the 9th and 10th centuries. In those early uses, what became of something was literally where it came to rest.

The Germanic root behind cuman is Proto-Germanic kwemaną, which appears in nearly every branch of the Germanic family: German kommen, Dutch komen, Gothic qiman, Old Norse koma. The be- prefix in Old English had a range of functions, one of which was to intensify or complete an action, so becuman carried a sense of coming fully or definitively to a state. This is the meaning that survived into modern English: when something becomes something else, it has completed a transition and arrived at a new condition.

Middle English writers used bicomen and bicume freely. By the 13th century the word was doing the work it does today: describing transformation. Chaucer wrote of things becoming other things. The past tense became appears regularly in 14th-century manuscripts, with the vowel shift already visible in the spelling. The Great Vowel Shift of the 15th and 16th centuries changed the pronunciation of the long vowels without changing the spelling, giving become the modern sound that rhymes with home.

Became entered literary English as a clean, forceful word for transformation completed. Shakespeare used it often and gave it emotional weight: what became of characters, what suited them. The double meaning, past transformation and present suitability, was already established by his time. In both cases the word pointed toward a condition arrived at rather than a condition born with, which is why it carries a particular philosophical weight: becoming is always a process, and became is where that process ended.