sin

English sin comes from Old English synn, a noun recorded before 900 in religious and legal prose. In those texts it names an offense against divine law, but it also keeps the older sense of a wrongful act or breach. The form belongs to the Germanic word-family seen across early northern Europe. By the time Alfred's translators wrote in Wessex in the late ninth century, synn was already a settled Christian term.

Old English synn continues Proto-Germanic sundjo, reconstructed from Old Saxon sundia, Old High German sunta, and Old Norse synd. That older Germanic noun meant an offense, hostility, or act that made one guilty. Christianity did not create the word, but it narrowed and deepened it. After conversion, synn was the ordinary word used to translate Latin peccatum in sermons, penitentials, and Bible glosses.

The spelling shortened over time as English sound patterns changed after 1066. Middle English texts from the thirteenth century write sinne, preserving the final vowel sound and doubled consonant. By the early modern period, the final unstressed vowel dropped from speech and then from common spelling, leaving sin. The meaning stayed morally heavy even as the form became leaner.

Modern English sin still means an offense against religious or moral law, but it also widened into figurative use. People speak of sins against taste, political sins, or small domestic sins with deliberate exaggeration. That lighter tone depends on the old gravity still being felt underneath. The word has kept both judgment and drama for more than a thousand years.