A word for delay, once a word for slowness
In current English, late is mainly a time word. A payment is late when it misses the due date. A frost is late when it arrives near the end of the season. Night is late when most of the day is already gone. The same adjective can stand before a name as a courteous marker of death: her late father, the late senator. As an adverb it covers the same ground: to show up late, to work late, to have been in town as late as Thursday. None of these uses sounds like a comment on character. The older English of the word did.
The origin of the word late is native, not borrowed. English did not import it from French or Latin. It inherited the adjective from Old English and has used it, in writing, since before the twelfth century.
A Germanic inheritance
Old English læt already meant more than one thing. It described a person or action that was slow, sluggish, slack, or negligent. It also described something that came after the customary or expected moment. The adverb late existed in the same period with the sense slowly. Those two grammatical lives, adjective and adverb, have stayed paired ever since.
Middle English kept the word as late, lat, and a cluster of northern and Scots spellings such as lait and laite. The modern long vowel is the ordinary native development, not a foreign remodel. French tard and Latin tardus later supplied English with tardy, a near-synonym that never displaced the older adjective. Late remained the everyday Germanic term for being behind the clock.
The comparative and superlative history is part of the same inheritance. Old English lætra, slower, is the source of later. A Middle English variant with a short vowel and a doubled t became latter, which then specialized: the second of two items, or the part nearer the end of a stretch. The superlative latost, together with the related form lætemest, contracted into last. Last train, last chapter, and the latter half are therefore not strangers parked beside late. They are its old inflected forms, each given a narrower job.
Slackness at the root
Old English læt continues Proto-West Germanic lat and Proto-Germanic lataz, reconstructed with the senses slow, sluggish, and lazy. Gothic lats, Old Norse latr, Old Saxon lat, and Old High German laz belong to that set. The family is Common Germanic, not a local English invention.
Outside Germanic, Latin lassus, weary or faint, is widely treated as a relative. English lassitude is a later learned noun from that Latin adjective. It is a cousin of late, not a descendant of læt. The two lines met English at different times and through different doors.
Deeper still, handbooks connect the group with a Proto-Indo-European root for slackening, weariness, or letting go. The fine reconstruction is not settled. Some accounts write a root meaning to let go or slacken, with a derived form meaning slow or weary. Others start from a root meaning to be tired. The disagreement is about how to spell the ancestor, not about whether English late, German lass, and Latin lassus sit in one family.
That same deep stock is the usual source of English let in the sense allow or leave behind. A few descriptions even treat late, on the surface, as if it were built on let. Historically the two words are siblings, not a case of late being coined in English by adding an ending to the verb. The shared idea is slackness: to let go is to loosen a hold; to be late, at the oldest layer, was to be slow to move.
From temperament to the clock
The first layer is manner, not the hour. A late person in early English was slow to act, reluctant, even remiss. Middle English still used the adjective that way, including of someone slow to believe. That reading then faded from the standard language and survives mainly in dialect. What standard English kept is the temporal sense that was already available in Old English: after the proper time.
From the mid-thirteenth century the adjective also meant occurring in the latter part of a period. That is the sense still alive in late afternoon, late spring, and labels such as Late Latin or the late Middle Ages. Around 1400 another step appears: recent, not long past, especially in the phrase of late. From that recent-past use, early fifteenth-century English developed the funerary courtesy now familiar before a name. Originally it marked someone not many years dead, rather than a figure from a distant century. A related, slightly older courtesy used the word for a person who had lately held an office or a relationship and did so no longer.
The proverb that prefers a delayed deed to none at all is recorded from the late fifteenth century. It already treats late as a matter of timing, not of a lazy temperament. By then the clock reading had become the main one.
Later English added further specializations of delay: a late fee on a missed payment; a star classed as late in astronomy because it is cooler than the sun. Those are extensions of after the expected point or toward the end of a scale. They do not restore the old sense sluggish.
What the cousins kept
Dutch laat still means late in the clock sense, as English does. Many other Germanic relatives stayed closer to character. German lass is idle or weary; for a delayed appointment German uses a different word. Swedish lat, Norwegian lat, Icelandic latur, and Danish lad all point at laziness. Gothic lats is weary, sluggish, lazy. English is the language that specialized the adjective into a time word and left the sluggish reading to dialect, to last and latter as grammatical leftovers, and to a polite formula for the recently dead.
The sharpest residue is last itself: the English superlative of a word that once meant slow.