A path, a sequence, and a dinner plate
English uses course for a ship’s heading, a series of lectures, a stage of a meal, a golf layout, and the ordinary run of events. Those jobs look scattered until you notice the shared picture: something moving along a line, or a set of steps that have to be taken in order.
The origin of the word course is a borrowing, not a native Germanic inheritance. By about 1300, Middle English had cours, taken from Old French cors or cours. That French noun already named running, a river’s flow, and the track a ship followed. Behind it stands Latin cursus, used for a running, a journey, a direction, and the way a stream goes. The Oxford English Dictionary treats the English history as mixed: partly from French cours, partly from the later French feminine course, and partly from Latin cursus itself. In later English spelling those streams have fused, which is why one form now does so much work.
How Latin built the noun
Latin cursus is an action noun on currere, to run. The stem is the same one that appears in the past participle, curs-, joined to the suffix Latin used for the act of doing something. The morphology is clear in Latin even though English speakers no longer hear a verb inside the noun.
The verb is reconstructed from a Proto-Indo-European root *ḱers-, to run. That root is a scholarly reconstruction, not a word anyone wrote down. What can be checked are later relatives. From Latin currere English later took current, cursor, and curriculum, each of which still carries running, flowing, or a track. Italian corso, Spanish curso, Portuguese curso, and modern French cours are Romance siblings of the same Latin noun. German Kurs is a later borrowing, used for a class and also for a market rate. Celtic languages keep a related vehicle sense: Old Irish and Middle Welsh carr meant a cart or wagon, a shift from running to the thing that runs. Lithuanian karšti, to go quickly, is often placed on the same root. A proposed link from this family to English horse is much less secure; historical linguists have long marked that pairing as doubtful, and it should not be treated as a settled cognate.
French later split what English kept as one word. Modern French cours is the ordinary term for a class or a lecture series. French course, with a sounded final consonant, is a race, a run, or an errand. English absorbed both the older masculine cours and the feminine course and wrote them alike. That merger helps explain why a classroom, a racetrack, and a prescribed path can share a spelling.
From motion to method
The earliest English uses, around 1300, stay close to motion: onward movement, a prescribed run, the ground laid out for a race. The same period already has order and sequence. That is not a large jump if a course is the line things follow. Early in the fourteenth century the word also names habitual procedure and a person’s way of life. To hold one’s course is to keep to a chosen line. The course of nature is the line events ordinarily take.
From a line of movement, or from stages that must be passed, Middle English developed the sense of a series arranged in a set order. That series sense is the parent of several later specializations. A course of treatment, recorded around 1600, is a succession of prescribed acts meant to produce a result. The academic meaning, a planned series of study, appears in English about the same time. French had already used cours for organized study in the fourteenth century, with an attestation in 1331, so the classroom sense likely arrived with French academic vocabulary rather than being coined from nothing in English.
The meal sense is older than the university sense. By the late fourteenth century a course could be the portion of a meal served at one time, a stage in the progress of dinner. Water follows a similar metaphor: the flow of a stream is mid-fourteenth century; the channel itself is later, from the 1660s. Late medieval English also used courses for the flow of bodily fluids. A specific menstrual sense is recorded from the 1560s and is now mainly historical or medical.
The set phrase of course, meaning as a natural consequence, is attested from the 1540s. It is a shortening of of the ordinary course. An earlier equivalent, bi cours, already existed around 1300. Matter of course, something to be expected, is eighteenth-century.
The verb is later than the noun. In the mid-fifteenth century it meant to pursue or hound, a sense now mostly limited to hunting. From the 1530s it could mean to run or pass over. Blood that courses through the veins still keeps the running image the noun began with.
A few specialized uses keep the geometry of a line or a layer. A ship’s course is its heading. A course of masonry is a continuous row of brick or stone. On a square-rigged ship a course is the lowest square sail on a mast. Golf courses and racecourses are the ground over which a prescribed path is followed, close to the oldest English meaning.
One date worth keeping
If you want a single dating, use about 1300. That is when English first records the word, in a religious poem known as the Southern Passion, and when the ideas of a run and a sequence are already both present. The Oxford evidence and the French and Latin etymons agree on that window even if they disagree on how much Latin arrived directly rather than through French. The classroom and the dinner table are later specializations of sequence. The verb to run never quite left. Curriculum, borrowed later as a learned Latin word for a program of study, is literally a little racecourse. Course is the everyday form of the same picture: not a static label, but a path that has to be followed from one point to the next.