together

Old English had a compound for the act of being in the same place at the same time: tōgædere, from tō (to, toward) and gædere (together, in assembly). The gædere element was related to gaderian, the Old English verb meaning to gather, and both descended from a Proto-Germanic root carrying the sense of things brought into a common place. Texts from the ninth century use the word with no fanfare, as though it had always been there. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 878 describes Alfred the Great meeting his nobles tōgædere to plan a campaign against the Danes.

The form shifted through Middle English as the vowels of the language compressed and spelling conventions changed. Togeder, togedere, and togeders all appear in manuscripts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Geoffrey Chaucer used togeder in the Canterbury Tales in the 1380s, by which point the word had shed its two-part transparency: almost no reader parsed it as to plus a gathering word. The compound had fused into a single idea.

The th- ending that marks the modern spelling settled in during the sixteenth century, partly through the influence of London printing houses standardizing spelling across regional dialects. By the time the King James Bible appeared in 1611, together was fixed in its current form: let them be knit together in love, as Colossians has it. The word had become both spatial and metaphorical, covering both standing in the same place and being unified in purpose.

English later developed compound uses that pushed the word further. Altogether appeared in the fourteenth century, adding a sense of completeness. Get-together as a noun appeared in American English around 1900, turning the adverb into a social category. Together, used as a compliment for someone composed and self-possessed, is an American coinage of the late 1960s. A word that began as a spatial description now names a quality of character.