What speakers mean by it
Forbiddance names the act of telling someone not to do a thing, and, in some dictionaries, the condition of being under that ban. It can also stand for an edict or official prohibition. The sense is narrow and has stayed that way. What has not stayed is its place in ordinary vocabulary. English speakers still forbid, still call things forbidden, and still find a face or a landscape forbidding. When they need a noun, they usually reach for ban or prohibition instead. Forbiddance survives as a formal, somewhat bookish option: the native verb with an abstract ending, rather than a Latin loan.
Made in English, not imported
The origin of the word forbiddance is a derivation, not a borrowing. Historical dictionaries treat it as forbid plus the suffix -ance, assembled inside English. First recorded use falls in the early seventeenth century. Collins and other desk dictionaries put the window at 1600 to 1610. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence is from about 1608 to 1611, in the writing of Joseph Hall, later bishop of Norwich and already a satirist and religious prose writer. Hall published a great deal in those years, including volumes of epistles and a book of characters; the dictionaries do not require us to pin the first hit to one title.
The date is Early Modern. The verb was already old. The novelty was the ending. From about 1500 onward English writers freely added French-looking noun suffixes to native stems when they wanted a name for an action or a state. Forbiddance belongs to that habit.
The Germanic verb
Forbid continues Old English forbēodan, which already meant to prohibit, restrain, refuse, or set aside. Middle English kept it as forbeden; later spelling settled on the modern form. The past tense and participle have always been irregular: older forbead, forbudon, forboden gave way to forbad, forbade, and forbidden.
The compound is pan-Germanic. Old Frisian had forbiada, Dutch has verbieden, Old High German farbiotan became German verbieten, North Germanic yields Swedish förbjuda, and Gothic attests faurbiudan. The reconstructed Proto-Germanic verb is *furibeudaną, from a prefix *furi and a verb *beudaną.
That verb is the ancestor of English bid in the old sense of command or proclaim, not the later auction sense. Behind it stands a Proto-Indo-European root written *bheudh- or *bʰewdʰ-, whose cluster of meanings involves being awake, taking notice, and making someone aware. In Germanic the sense moved from awareness to announcement and then to order. Adding for- turned the order against the hearer: a command that something not happen.
Handbooks differ slightly on the prefix. Some gloss Old English for- in this verb as against. Others stress away, or a pejorative and blocking force also visible in forget and forswear. The disagreement is over the shade of for-, not over the makeup of the compound.
A Romance ending on a home stem
The suffix -ance came into English from French. French had leveled Latin -antia and -entia, the endings that built abstract nouns from verbs and adjectives, into a single -ance. English later inherited both -ance and -ence, and from the sixteenth century it used them productively. Guidance, clearance, and performance show the pattern on stems of mixed origin. Forbiddance applies the same ending to a Germanic verb: a hybrid of the sort Early Modern English produced without fuss.
English already possessed a fully native noun for the same idea. Old English forbod, Middle English forbode or forbod, meant a prohibition. The archaic noun forbode still exists, and it matches Dutch verbod, German Verbot, Danish forbud, and Swedish förbud. Forbiddance did not fill a hole so much as offer a newer abstract beside that older noun, at a time when prohibition, from Latin prohibere through French, was also current.
Sense held still; company changed
Core meaning barely moved. From Hall’s generation onward the word is the act of forbidding, a command against a thing, or the state of being forbidden. Literary English kept it in that range. Milton uses it in Paradise Lost for the command against the fruit. Later prose still uses it for a moral or official ban. Webster’s 1828 dictionary already called the noun little used. The 1913 revision marked the sense obsolete. Modern dictionaries still list the word, so the obsoleteness label was too strong, but the rarity was real. Forbiddance never became the default partner of forbid.
Competition, not semantic drift, explains the fade. Prohibit and prohibition took the legal and public register, and in American English prohibition later named a specific historical policy. Forbidden remained the everyday participle and the tag in forbidden fruit, a phrase tied to the Genesis story and recorded as an English idiom from that biblical source. The adjective forbidding even grew a secondary sense, uninviting or grim, from the early eighteenth century. Forbiddance did not follow. It stayed a noun of act and edict.
The older noun still in the family
The clearest takeaway is the older sibling. Long before anyone added -ance to forbid, English already had forbod, a prohibition built on the same root that gives German Verbot. Forbiddance is a seventeenth-century remake of that idea, with a French noun ending stitched onto a Germanic command. The word looks faintly Latinate. Its verb is the same old order not to.