beginning

The Old English verb beginnan, recorded in texts from the eighth century onward, combined the prefix be- with a verb ginnan that meant to open or split apart. That inner root ginnan was already falling out of independent use by the time Beowulf was composed, surviving mainly in prefixed compounds. The gerund beginning, formed by adding the Old English -ing suffix, appears in Alfred the Great's ninth-century translations of Boethius and Orosius. Alfred needed a noun for a starting point and the language had one waiting.

Proto-Germanic biginnan had cognates across the Germanic family: Old High German biginnan, Old Saxon beginnan, Gothic duginnan, Old Norse byrja (from a related root). The inner element ginnan shares a possible ancestor with Proto-Indo-European ghen-, meaning to gape or open, which also produced English gap, gape, and yawn. A beginning was literally an opening, a splitting of what was closed.

Middle English reshaped the spelling into bigynning, begynnynge, and begynnyng as Norman influence pressed English scribes toward French phonetic habits. Chaucer used the word in Troilus and Criseyde around 1385: 'The begynnyng of thy dethe.' Wycliffe's Bible of 1382 rendered Genesis 1:1 as 'In the bigynnyng God made of nouyt heuene and erthe,' echoing the Latin initium of the Vulgate. The Old English architecture remained; only the dress changed.

By the sixteenth century the spelling had settled into beginning, and Shakespeare used it as a philosophical pivot in The Tempest: 'What's past is prologue,' framing all that came before as prelude to a new start. The word now covers geological epochs, personal histories, and software initialization routines with equal ease. Its Proto-Germanic root suggested an opening; English has used it to open nearly everything.