mōd

Mood comes from Old English mōd, a word of immense range and weight in the language of the Anglo-Saxons. Mōd meant the mind, the heart, the spirit, the inner being — not just emotional states but the whole of a person's interior life: their thoughts, their will, their courage, their character. In Old English poetry and prose, a man's mōd was the seat of his identity. The Beowulf poet uses mōd in compound after compound: mōdcræft (mental power, cleverness), mōdlufan (love of heart), mōdsefa (heart and mind, the inner person). The word was one of the central terms in Old English for what it means to be a person: to have a mōd was to have a self.

The word belonged to a family of Proto-Germanic terms all relating to the inner person and emotional/intellectual capacity. Old High German muot (feeling, disposition, courage), Old Norse móðr (wrath, courage) — all cognates. The Proto-Germanic root *mōdaz likely meant something like disposition or temperament, but in Old English the word expanded far beyond mood in the modern sense. Mōd encompassed what modern English separates into 'mind,' 'spirit,' 'courage,' 'feeling,' and 'will.' A warrior's great mōd was his courage in battle; a wise man's mōd was the seat of his wisdom; a grieving person's mōd was their heart broken by loss. It was the whole inner person.

The narrowing of mōd to mood — from the whole inner person to a single passing emotional state — tracks the gradual availability of alternative vocabulary for the non-emotional aspects of the inner life. As English absorbed French and Latin vocabulary after the Norman Conquest, it gained 'mind' (from Old English gemynd, but reinforced and specified by Latin mens), 'spirit,' 'soul,' 'intellect,' 'reason,' 'will,' and many other terms that could carry specific aspects of what mōd had covered. As each of these alternatives became available, mōd was freed to narrow. It settled into what it has become today: a passing emotional state, a temporary coloring of experience. A mood is not who you are; it is how you feel right now. The Old English mōd was both.

The grammatical term 'mood' — indicative mood, subjunctive mood, imperative mood — comes from the same word but through a parallel and somewhat confusing route. Medieval Latin used modus (manner, way) to describe verbal categories expressing different attitudes toward an action, and English translators of Latin grammar sometimes used 'mood' to translate modus. The two words (the emotional mood from Old English mōd and the grammatical mood from Latin modus) are distinct etymologically but have fused in English spelling, creating a homograph that connects the feeling of the inner person to the grammatical mode of the verb. Whether this fusion is coincidence or tells us something about the relationship between grammar and psychology is an interesting question: the subjunctive mood, after all, is the verbal form that expresses the uncertain, the hypothetical, the wished-for — a kind of grammatical mōd.