What the word covers now
In present-day English, court is a short noun with a long reach. It names a judge, a courtroom, and the institution that tries a case. It names a monarch’s household and the people who attend a ruler. It names an open yard inside a building, a dead-end street, and the marked rectangle where tennis or basketball is played. The verb to court — to woo someone, or to seek a person’s favor — belongs to the same family. Those uses feel far apart until the history is laid out: they are branches of one borrowed word whose oldest picture is a fenced space, not a wig or a gavel.
The origin of the word court is a French story that English took over after the Norman Conquest, then stretched to fit palaces, law, sport, and romance.
Borrowed, not inherited
English did not grow this noun from Old English. It borrowed it in the later twelfth century from Old French cort or curt, the same form that appears in Anglo-French, the French spoken in England after 1066. Modern French settled on cour. Early Middle English spellings include curt, corte, and court. The ou in the modern spelling points back to a French long u; in English, around 1500, that vowel opened, a change shared with course and source.
The first English sense was not a building. Late in the twelfth century the word meant a formal assembly held by a sovereign. Around 1200 it also meant the residence of that sovereign: a palace, a princely house, the place where a ruler kept state. Native English already had words for halls, yards, and gathering posts, but the language of royal household and government after the Conquest was French, and the French noun came in with that world.
An enclosed yard, then the people in it
Old French cort comes from Latin cortem, the accusative of cors, itself a shortened form of older cohors. The Latin noun first meant an enclosed yard. From the crowd standing in such a yard it came to mean a company of attendants, and also a body of soldiers. That military sense is the one English kept in cohort, a doublet: the same Latin source arriving by a less clipped route, so English ended up with two words from one ancestor.
The inner structure of cohors is still readable. It is an assimilated com- meaning with or together, plus a stem hort- related to hortus, a garden or plot of ground. That hort- piece is the same family that gives horticulture. Behind both, etymologists reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European root *gher- with the sense of grasping or enclosing. The oldest image is therefore a bounded plot that could hold plants, animals, troops, or a household — an enclosure, not yet a tribunal.
Related Romance forms keep the contracted noun: Italian corte, Spanish corte, Occitan cort. English courtyard, recorded in the sixteenth century, restates the old idea twice, once with the French loan and once with native yard. The tautology is useful: by then court had taken on so many political and legal senses that the compound had to underline the physical yard again.
The likely pull of curia
Sources agree on the Latin yard, and they are more cautious about a second influence. Medieval Latin used curia for a sovereign’s assembly and for a legal tribunal. Curia itself did not survive as an ordinary Romance noun, but Old French cort appears to have been associated with it. Historical dictionaries treat that association as the best explanation for two of the heaviest modern loads: the ruler’s council and the court of law. The point is not that cort is a sound-change from curia. It is a probable blending of meanings, and the evidence is semantic rather than a neat chain of forms. The blending should be marked as likely, not as proven.
Medieval practice makes the blend easy to understand. Early justice was not a separate profession sitting in a purpose-built room. A king or a lord heard disputes in his own hall, among the same attendants who formed his household. English records the legal sense around 1300: a tribunal for investigation, and also the hall or chamber where justice was administered. An adjective meaning pertaining to a court is a little earlier, from the late thirteenth century. The sovereign’s surroundings in regal state, already named around 1200, supplied the bridge.
Yards, games, streets, and manners
The physical sense never dropped out. By the early fourteenth century English uses court for an enclosed space attached to buildings. By the 1510s it names a smooth, level plot for a ball game, first tennis; later basketball, squash, and related sports inherited the same label. In the 1680s it is a short arm of a public street boxed in on three sides, later often a poor court or a small business district. In the nineteenth century, exhibition halls such as the Crystal Palace labeled indoor bays as courts, stretching the old idea of a bounded area inside a larger structure.
The verb is later still. From the 1570s, to court is to try to win favor by attentive, often amorous behavior, modeled on the manners expected around a royal household. Related loans show how thick that social world became in English. Courtesy is in the language from the thirteenth century. Courtesan and cortège arrived later through Italian and French. Courtesy and court share a root, though their spoken vowels later drifted; the mismatch is a detail of French stress and English sound change, not a sign that the words are unrelated.
German offers a parallel, not a cognate. Hof is the native word for a court or farmyard. From it, Middle High German built an adjective meaning well-bred, which later came to mean beautiful in modern hübsch. English court and German Hof walked the same social path from enclosure to manners, on different etymological tracks. English also formed personal names such as Curtis from the idea of a courtly, educated man.
What the doublet still shows
Cohort still means a band of people, often soldiers, because Latin kept the fuller cohors for that company. Court kept the contracted cortem and, with the probable coloring of curia, became the name of palaces, judges, and tennis lawns. One enclosed yard split into two English words, and the legal sense is the later overlay, not the starting point.