Force, criticism, and a sudden start
In present-day English, attack is the ordinary word for bringing force to bear. The verb can mean to strike a person or a position with weapons, to tear into an argument or a reputation, to set to work on a hard job with energy, or, of illness or rust, to begin damaging a body or a material. The noun names the blow itself, a sudden episode of sickness, the offensive side of a match, the first bite of a musical tone, even an attempt to break into a computer system. The shared idea is a sharp beginning of contact, often with harm in view.
The origin of the word attack is not a native Old English tale of raids. It is a later borrowing whose older relatives still mean to stick or to fasten.
French, Italian, and an early-modern import
English did not inherit this form from the old Germanic stock of the language. The verb is first recorded around 1600, taken from French attaquer, itself a sixteenth-century word. That French verb comes from Italian attaccare, especially in the military phrase attaccare battaglia, to join battle. The Oxford English Dictionary treats the English word as having more than one immediate parent: partly French, partly Italian. The American Heritage Dictionary traces it through Middle French to older Italian. Either way, the route is a Romance loan of the early modern period, not a word that grew quietly at home.
The noun followed a little later, from the 1660s, as a name for a violent onset. Seventeenth-century spellings such as attaque and attacque still show the French shape. One historical dictionary notes that Shakespeare does not use the word, and that it is missing from Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French–English dictionary under the French verb. Those silences are useful dating clues: the form was still settling into English at the start of the seventeenth century.
Close relatives spread with the same military vocabulary. French attaquer, Italian attaccare, Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan atacar, and Romanian ataca belong to one cluster. German later took attackieren, Polish atakować. They are siblings of the Italian–French fighting sense, not independent inventions from English.
A doublet of attach, and a stake underneath
The deeper story is about fastening, not fighting. Italian attaccare still means to stick or to attach as well as to fall on an enemy. Standard references treat English attack as a doublet of attach: two words that arrived by different paths from the same family. Attach had come in earlier, from Old French atachier or estachier. For a stretch of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, attach could also mean what English now reserves for attack. Middle English even used attach for a seizure of fever.
The Italian verb is usually taken as a- (from Latin ad, to) plus a stem pulled out of staccare, to detach. Staccare itself is a shortened form of distaccare, which goes back through Middle French destacher and Old French destachier: the prefix des- plus attachier. Attachier is an alteration of estachier, to fasten with a stake, from the noun estache, a stake. That noun is generally derived from a Frankish or Low Frankish word for a post, related to Proto-Germanic *stakkaz and to English stake, German Stecken, and Old Norse stakkr.
Wiktionary also cites a reconstructed Frankish verb *stakkijan, to stick or to attach. American Heritage records a rival account: that Italian staccare might instead be the prefix s- plus tacca, a notch or cut, sometimes linked to a Gothic word for a sign. The stake etymology is the usual one; the notch explanation is offered as an alternative, not as settled fact. What can be said with confidence is the family resemblance. Attach, detach, stake, Italian staccare, and musical staccato sit near the same Germanic post.
The original physical sense, then, is fastening something to a stake or making it stick. Military speech turned joining battle into falling upon the enemy. English borrowed the word after that shift had already taken place in French and Italian.
From the field to fever, print, and the concert hall
Once in English, the military sense was only the start. By the 1640s the verb could mean an attempt to ruin someone’s standing in writing or debate. From the 1670s a more general sense of beginning to act is recorded, first of diseases: illness attacks the body as an army attacks a town. The noun meaning a fit of disease is dated to 1811, though the older attach-of-fever usage shows that English had already linked seizure and sickness.
Later extensions keep the same pattern of sudden onset. A pianist’s attack is how a note is struck. In sport, attack is the side trying to score. In computing, an attack is an attempt to exploit a weakness. None of these required a new root; they stretched the idea of forceful contact.
English had older native words for the same military act. Middle English onresen, from Old English onrǣsan, meant to rush on; Old English onrǣs and Middle English resinge named an assault. Attack did not fill a vacuum so much as replace those older terms with a fashionable Romance borrowing.
The leftover from the post
The fact worth keeping is the kinship with attach. In modern English the two look like opposites: one binds, the other strikes. Historically they are twins. The fighting sense grew out of joining a battle, and that joining grew out of fastening to a stake. When English settled on attack for the blow and attach for the fastening, it split one Italian–French family into two everyday verbs. The wooden post is still there, if you know where to look.