courage

The Proto-Indo-European root kerd- meant heart, the physical organ. Latin inherited it as cor, genitive cordis, and the word named both the beating muscle and the seat of feeling and thought. Old French formed corage from cor around the 12th century, meaning the quality or condition of one's heart. It named a state, not an action.

Old French corage carried meanings ranging from spirit and temper to disposition before narrowing to bravery. Chrétien de Troyes used it in his Arthurian romances of the 1170s to describe the interior quality that drives a knight forward. It was not separate from fear; it was the feeling that could hold steady in the presence of fear. English took it as corage around 1290, in the reign of Edward I.

The Latin root cor also gave English cordial (warm-hearted), accord (hearts together), discord (hearts apart), and record (to bring back to the heart, that is, to remember). Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica (1265) discussed fortitudo as the virtue that steadies the soul under mortal danger; English vernacular sermons by 1300 were translating that concept as corage. Courage thus belongs to a family of heart-words measuring human relationship, memory, and steadiness.

By the 16th century courage had displaced older English words for bravery: hardiness, boldness, the noun heart itself. Shakespeare used it in both its bodily and moral senses. In Henry V (1599) he ties courage explicitly to blood and breath, the body's interior economy. The word shed its anatomical origin and kept its warmth. To say someone has heart and to say they have courage is still the same compliment.