A chosen companion, and an older job for the noun
In present-day English a friend is someone you like, trust, and keep by choice, usually outside the innermost family circle. The noun also stretches without much strain. A patron can be a friend of a museum. A slight acquaintance can sit on a contact list as a friend. With a capital letter, Friend names a member of the Society of Friends. Those later jobs sit on top of a much older core: a person bound to another by regard.
The origin of the word friend is not a French or Latin loan. English inherited the noun from Germanic, and the form itself began as a participle: the one who loves.
Already English before 1066
The word is recorded in Old English, well before the Norman Conquest, as frēond, with a dialect variant frīond. West Saxon and Mercian writing favors the first spelling; Northumbrian and Kentish sources more often show the second. Kentish also has a form with the second half of the diphthong unrounded. Late Old English already shows shorter spellings such as frend, a sign that the old long diphthong was beginning to collapse into a single vowel.
Middle English then multiplies the letters: frend, freend, friend, vrend, and still other shapes, including western and early freond. The modern spelling with ie is one survivor among those, not a new coinage. Scots keeps related forms such as freend. The path is inheritance, not borrowing: Proto-West Germanic *friund, and behind that Proto-Germanic *frijōndz. Handbooks differ slightly on how to write the reconstructed Germanic noun — *frijōndz in some, a longer participle *frijōjands in others — but they agree on the type of word and on the family it belongs to.
German Freund, Dutch vriend, Old Frisian friūnd, Old Saxon friund, Old High German friunt, and Gothic frijōnds are sister forms. They did not give English the word; they inherited it from the same ancestor.
The loving one, built on a verb for love and freedom
The Germanic noun is the present participle of a weak verb reconstructed as *frijōną. That verb meant to love or hold dear, and also to set free. Old English kept it as frēogan or frēon: to love, like, honor, and to release someone from slavery or confinement. The affectionate sense of the verb faded in English. The freedom sense survived as the modern verb to free. Morphologically, friend is that verb stem plus the old participle ending, the Germanic -nd also found in fiend. In rough modern dress the formation sits next to free plus that suffix, which is why some descriptions treat the noun as equivalent to free with an agentive ending. That is a real historical link, not a folk story, but it is a link of root and participle, not a living English suffix that speakers still add at will.
Behind the Germanic verb lies an Indo-European root cited as *pri- or *preyH-, with the sense to love or to please. Germanic also built a related noun for peace, *frithu-, which lives on in personal names such as Frederick. The same family supplies Friday, from the goddess Frigg, an old translation of the Latin day of Venus. Sanskrit priya, beloved, belongs further out on the same root, as do Slavic words for a friend or pal: Russian приятель, Polish przyjaciel, Czech přítel. Those are cognates. They are evidence for the deeper root, not a route by which the English noun entered the language.
Kin, lover, ally: what the form could hold
Old English frēond was broader than the modern everyday sense. It could name an ally, a kinsman, and, more rarely, a lover. The later habit of setting friends against family is incomplete even now, and it was weaker still in earlier English. In Scots the noun could mean a blood relation; that use is now obsolete there. North Germanic languages made the kinship reading the main one. Old Norse frændi, Icelandic frændi, Danish frænde, and Swedish frände keep the inherited form but mean kinsman rather than chosen companion. West Germanic languages, English among them, kept the social-affection sense that most speakers now treat as the default.
The noun also stood in alliterative company with feond, the ancestor of fiend. Both are masculine agent nouns from present participles, one from a verb of loving, the other from a verb of hating. Old English poets paired them as opposites. They look like a matched set, and in use they were, but they are parallel formations rather than a single split of one word. Some specialists argue that the hate-noun was analogical on the love-noun; that remains a debate, not a settled fact. The long vowel of fiend is the regular outcome. The vowel of friend was shortened in English. One plausible cause, offered with due caution, is pressure from compounds such as friendship, where a heavy cluster of consonants after the vowel commonly shortened it.
By the 1670s, capital-F Friend names a Quaker, a member of the Society of Friends. The ordinary verb to friend, to act as a friend, is occasional from about 1200, though befriend became the usual choice. The social-network sense of the verb is a twenty-first-century return of an old pattern: the noun used as a verb, with a new platform supplying the occasion. Old English already had compounds that treated friendship as a kind of wealth or lack: an abundance of friends, a want of them, a person rich in them. The social fact is ancient. The Facebook button is not.
The fork worth remembering
The most useful single fact is a split in the family, not a calendar date. On the Continent and in English, the old participle stayed with chosen regard: Freund, vriend, friend. In Scandinavia the same participle settled on kinship. English later narrowed its everyday use toward the first of those, even while older and dialectal English could still call a relative a friend. The noun never needed to be imported. It was already an English participle meaning, quite literally, the loving one — and the same root that named that person is the root that still names freedom.