Pain, injury, and a verb of impact
In current English, to hurt someone is to cause physical injury or emotional pain. The same verb, used without an object, names the sensation itself: a tooth hurts, a remark hurts. As a noun it covers a wound, a bruise, and the quieter damage of grief. As an adjective, hurt describes a person or a part already injured. Those uses sit close together now, but they are the late shape of a word that first named a collision. The origin of the word hurt is therefore less a story of aching than of ramming into something.
Middle English meets Old French
The verb is first recorded in Middle English in the late twelfth century, in forms such as hurten, hirten, and herten. Standard dictionaries treat it as a borrowing from Old French hurter, including the northern variety, a verb meaning to ram, strike, or smash into a person or an object. The living French descendant is heurter, still a verb of impact rather than of aching.
That French source is older in sense than the English one speakers now take as basic. Early English already used the verb both for knocking and for injuring: stumbling into a thing, charging against it, knocking objects together, and wounding a body, a reputation, or a feeling. The noun appears at about the same date, around 1200, for a wound and also for sorrow or lovesickness. Old French had a related noun for a blow or collision. The specifically medical and emotional sense of injury, as a lasting harm rather than a hit in progress, is an English development.
A ram that may never have been written down
Where Old French hurter itself came from is not settled. The reconstruction offered most often is an unattested Frankish noun, reconstructed as hūrt or hurt, meaning a ram: the animal, and by extension a battering ram. On that view the verb began as something like to butt in the way a ram does. The American Heritage Dictionary states the same picture in slightly different wording: Old French hurter probably meant to bang into, originally to butt like a ram, from that Frankish animal name.
A cluster of Germanic words for impact sits nearby, which is why the Frankish guess has stayed attractive. Middle High German hurten meant to run at or collide. Middle Dutch horten, and later Dutch horten, meant to knock or push against. Middle Low German hurten had a similar colliding sense. Old Norse hrútr meant a ram. Celtic forms have been brought in as well, among them Welsh hwrdd and Cornish hordh, both ram. None of these comparisons amounts to a proof of the French verb’s parent.
Deeper roots are more disputed still. Some accounts compare a Proto-Germanic verb of falling or beating and, behind that, an Indo-European root of striking or breaking. American Heritage notes two further guesses for a Germanic noun behind the ram-word: the horned one, or the snorter, the latter tied to Old Norse and Old English verbs of loud breathing or noise. Another line traces Old French hurter to Old Norse hrútr taken as a lengthened relative of the word for stag, which would make English hart a distant cousin. That is an alternative, not a consensus. Celtic origins have also been proposed for the French verb. The honest summary is that the medieval French form is clear enough, and everything before it is a set of competing reconstructions.
Native English, or only a loan?
The borrowing story has a genuine wrinkle. The earliest English examples are as old as the earliest French ones. Because of that overlap, some etymologists allow an unrecorded Old English verb, reconstructed as hyrtan, that later merged with the French verb of the same shape. No such Old English form has been found. The Oxford English Dictionary still presents the English verb as apparently a borrowing from French. Dictionary.com dates the first English evidence to 1150–1200 and likewise treats Old French as the immediate source, with the unattested Frankish ram as the probable older noun.
The position that fits the evidence without tidying it is this: the immediate medieval source looks French, while a hidden native ancestor cannot be ruled out and has not been proved. Other Germanic languages did not take this route for the everyday verb of injury. Danish skade, Swedish skada, German schaden, and Dutch schaden belong with English scathe, not with this word. English kept both families and then let hurt do most of the daily work.
How collision became ache
The collision sense thinned out. By the seventeenth century the meaning to knock was dying in the verb itself. It survived more clearly in hurtle, a related verb of rushing and striking. What remained in hurt was damage and pain.
The emotional use is old, but a familiar later wording, to hurt someone’s feelings, is attested from 1779. A further shift put the pain inside the body part: a limb that hurts as a source of pain is recorded from about 1850. The intransitive I hurt in the sense of feeling pain had been occasional; the usage familiar now is dated from around 1902. The past tense stayed irregular and identical with the present, hurt, in the manner of other short verbs of impact.
The adjective wounded or injured is in place by about 1400 as a past-participle form. Across that long span the word never needed a prefix or a suffix to do its work. The verb is the base; the noun and adjective grow from it.
The crash that English kept as a wound
The useful takeaway is physical rather than sentimental. English now uses the word for a slight, a bruise, and a medical injury, but the older picture is a ram colliding with a gate. Old French kept the blow. English, unusually, turned the same material into a noun for the wound that collision leaves, then into the quiet intransitive of a body that aches on its own. Hurtle kept the crash. Hurt kept the cost.