A wish with a foothold
In modern English, hope is both a verb and a noun. The verb means to want something to happen while treating it as possible. The noun is that wish plus the belief that the thing might come to pass: a feeling, an object of desire, or the person or circumstance that keeps the feeling alive. Christian usage still keeps a narrower, older layer, Hope as a theological virtue, the search for a future good that is hard but not impossible. Dictionaries still mark an archaic sense of trust or confidence, closer to how the word behaved a thousand years ago.
The origin of the word hope sits in native English, not in a later borrowing. Many everyday English nouns of feeling arrived through French or Latin. This one did not.
From Old English, not from Latin
Speakers already had the verb hopian and the noun hopa in Old English, well before the twelfth century. The verb could mean to trust, to place confidence, and, in religious writing, to look for salvation or mercy. The noun, attested toward the end of the Old English period, meant confidence in the future, often with God or Christ as the ground of that confidence. Middle English carried both forms forward as hopen and hope.
Old English also used a prefixed noun, tohopa, built with the particle to plus hopa. It appears in psalms and pastoral writing as a rendering of Latin spes, and it stands beside faith and charity when writers list the three theological virtues. Old Saxon had a matching compound. The prefix later dropped away in English; the short noun did the work.
This family is West Germanic, but it is not pan-Germanic in the usual way. Cognates cluster around the North Sea: Old Frisian hopia, Middle Low German and Middle Dutch hopen, modern Dutch hopen, Frisian hoopje. High German did not start with the same verb. Old High German writers used gidingen and the noun gedinge. Middle High German hoffen appears first as a northern form, probably taken from Low German, and only becomes common in the later thirteenth century. Danish håbe, Norwegian håpe, and Swedish hoppas belong to that Low German and Dutch stream, not to a separate ancient northern inheritance.
The more ordinary Germanic way of talking about expectation was a different verb, reconstructed as West Germanic *wānijan, the ancestor of English ween. English kept ween for a long time as think, suppose, expect, while hope specialized. Old English also had hyht, a noun for joyous expectation and spiritual trust, which later faded from ordinary use.
An unclear root
Comparative reconstruction gives a Proto-West Germanic verb *hopōn, a weak class-two verb meaning to wait in anticipation, to expect, or to hope. Beyond that reconstruction, the trail thins out. Standard references call the further etymology unknown or unclear. American Heritage traces the modern verb only as far as Old English hopian. Merriam-Webster stops at Old English and a kinship with Middle High German hoffen. The English word is old and native, but its prehistory is not agreed.
Several guesses have been offered. One, associated with Klein, links hope to the verb hop, as if the original picture were a leap of expectation. The hopping verb comes from a different Germanic reconstruction, *huppōną, with a doubled consonant, and most etymologists treat the leap story as a guess rather than a demonstrated link. Another proposal, discussed in German handbooks following Sanders, compares Greek kypto, to bend or stoop, and notes an old sense to fear in Old Saxon and some High German dialects, plus German verhoffen, used of game animals that freeze when startled. On that view the waiting of hope might once have been a tense crouch. The same discussion sometimes brings in *huppōną again, but the single p of *hopōn against the geminate of *huppōną still needs an explanation. Comparisons with Latin cupio, to desire, have been tried and are widely treated as unlikely.
None of these deeper stories is secure. What can be said without stretching is morphological: hope is a simple inherited stem, not a transparent English compound. The only clear extra piece in the older language is the to- of tohopa.
Latin spes, the usual classical word for the same idea, is a different family. It underlies despair, desperate, and, more surprisingly, English speed, from a Proto-Indo-European root often given as *spes-, prosperity. Greek elpis is another separate word. English hope does not come from either of them.
How the sense widened
Early uses sit inside Christian Latin culture, where spes is a virtue. From the early thirteenth century the English verb is also recorded in a plainer sense: to wish for something, to desire it. Around 1200 the noun covers expectation of a desired thing, trust, and wishful desire. By the late fourteenth century it can mean the thing hoped for and the grounds for hoping. Personification, Hope as an allegorical figure, is attested from about 1300.
The older trust-sense never quite vanished. It survives as an archaic reading and in set phrases such as hope in, still familiar from biblical English. Hope against hope, recorded in the 1610s, is an English echo of Romans 4:18, where Abraham believes against hope. The phrase keeps the older idea that hope can be a stance, not only a mood.
A later English phrase looks like a chapter of the same story and is not. Forlorn hope, from the 1570s, calques Dutch verloren hoop. In that Dutch phrase hoop means a troop or heap, a suicide vanguard, not the feeling of hope. English speakers heard their own noun instead, and the misunderstood calque helped pull forlorn toward faint or dwindling. The two hoops, feeling and heap, are historically separate.
English also has a place-name hope, as in Stanhope, from Old English hop in the sense of a small valley, found mainly in names. That word is a homonym, not a sense of the verb. A northern coastal hope, a small bay, comes from Icelandic hóp and is likewise unrelated.
What the German borrowing shows
The cleanest dating clue is not a reconstructed root but a map. English had hopian while High German still said gidingen. When German later adopted hoffen from the Low German coast, it was borrowing a North Sea word that English already owned. The English verb is not a late import. It is one of the coastal Germanic words that English kept, and that the rest of the family only partly shared.