What the word names now
In everyday English, honey is first of all the thick, sweet food bees make from flower nectar. Jars on a shelf, comb from a hive, and the pale gold to brown color of that food all use the same noun. From there the word has spread, without losing the older sense, into nicknames for people, into praise for a thing that is unusually good, and into a verb meaning to sweeten something or to address someone in that affectionate way.
Those later uses are metaphors built on the food. They are not a separate borrowing and they did not push the hive-product meaning aside.
Inherited from Old English
The origin of the word honey is a native Germanic inheritance, not a loan from French or Latin. Old English already had hunig, also spelled huniġ. Middle English writers most often wrote hony or honi. The modern spelling with -ey is an English writing habit of the same kind that produced money; the extra letter does not add a suffix with its own meaning.
The written English record for the noun begins in the Old English period, before 1150. For a household word that is as far back as the language’s surviving texts can reasonably go. Nothing in the form suggests a scholar’s import. It sits with other common inherited nouns, not with later Culinary French.
Scots keeps close shapes such as hinny. Those are the same word in a neighboring variety, not a new etymology.
The Germanic set, and the word Gothic did not use
Old English hunig matches a compact family across the North Sea and the Baltic: German Honig, Dutch honig and honing, West Frisian hunich, Old Saxon honeg, Old Norse hunang, Swedish honung, Danish honning, Icelandic hunang. Linguists reconstruct a Proto-Germanic neuter *hunagą, with an older variant *hunangą still visible in the North Germanic forms that keep the extra n. West Germanic languages more often show the shorter stem.
Finnish hunaja looks like a cousin but is not. It is a loan into Finnish from Germanic.
Gothic, the earliest Germanic language with a substantial written corpus, stands apart. Its word for the same food was miliþ. That form continues a much wider Indo-European honey-name, from a root reconstructed as *melit-. Latin mel, Greek meli, French miel, Spanish miel, and Italian miele all belong to that other family. In most of Germanic, that older honey-word receded. English still has a faint relative in mildew, whose first element is the same stock, and it kept a different Indo-European drink-word in mead, from Old English medu, the fermented honey beverage, going back to *médhu-. The ordinary name for the substance in the jar, though, is the hunig line.
So English kitchen vocabulary holds two deep histories at once: mead from the drink-root, honey from the northern food-root, and a lost *melit- relative that Gothic kept and English did not keep as the everyday noun.
Before Germanic, the trail thins
The Germanic family is solid. The step before it is not.
One proposal ties *hunagą to a Proto-Indo-European word for a yellow, golden, or brownish color. Suggested comparisons include a Sanskrit form for golden, Welsh canecon for gold, and Greek knēkos for a yellowish plant, safflower. On that view the Germanic noun would have named honey by its look.
Other reconstructions set a pre-Germanic *kn̥h₂onkós from a root *kn̥h₂ónks and add possible relatives outside Germanic: Tocharian B kronkśe for a bee, Albanian qengjë for a beehive, Latin canicae for bran. Those links are comparative guesses, not forms written in a Germanic hand, and they are not equally persuasive.
Etymological dictionaries also leave room for a substrate source: a word taken up in northern Europe from a language spoken there before Germanic, with no recoverable further family. Because there is no inscription that settles the point, the fair account is that the Germanic cluster is secure and the deeper root is uncertain. It is better to leave that gap open than to force a single tidy story.
In English the noun is morphologically simple. There is no prefix to strip away. The Old English ending -ig is the local shape of the Germanic stem, not the later adjective suffix -y stuck onto an independent root hon-.
How the senses moved
The food sense has been stable for as long as English has been written. What widened is how far speakers could send the word by likeness.
By the middle of the fourteenth century honey was already used as a term of endearment. The same century yields honeyed, first of food covered or sweetened with the substance, then of speech made smooth or pleasant. A verb to honey, in the sense to sweeten, is implied there; by about 1600 it could also mean to call a person honey. In the eighteenth century Samuel Johnson disliked past-participle adjectives such as honied that seemed to lack a well-established verb behind them. The objection did not last. Honeyed language is still ordinary.
American English added a further stretch in 1888: honey as something remarkably good of its kind, the sense in phrases about a honey of a car or a honey of a deal. Honey-bunch is recorded by 1904. Informal hon is a clipped form of the affectionate use. None of these later senses needed a new source-language. They are the food word used as praise.
Two roots in one cupboard
The detail worth keeping is the split inside Germanic. English honey, German Honig, and Swedish honung are one inherited name for the stuff bees make. Gothic miliþ is the other name, the one that matches Latin and Greek. English speakers kept the northern word for the jar, and mead for the drink brewed from it. Those two English words look like a pair in the kitchen. They do not come from the same root, and the older European honey-word survives in English mainly as a ghost inside mildew, not as the name of the food itself.