What English speakers mean by it now
In everyday English a meeting is both an event and an act. It can be a planned gathering with a purpose, the people who sit in that gathering, or the simple fact of two paths crossing. The word covers a board session, a chance encounter on a platform, the place where two rivers join, and, in a narrower tradition, a Quaker congregation as an administrative body. None of that modern range had to be invented from scratch. The noun was already doing assembly work more than a thousand years ago.
The origin of the word meeting is native Germanic English, not a loan from French or Latin office vocabulary. Its shape is transparent: the verb meet plus the noun-forming suffix -ing. What changed is less the skeleton than the kind of coming-together speakers chose to name.
From Old English into the middle period
Old English already had mēting and the prefixed form ġemēting, used for an assembly, an association, or a society as well as for the fact of encountering someone. The form passed into Middle English as meeting, meting, metinge, and similar spellings. The Oxford English Dictionary places the noun in the Old English period, before 1150. That dating matters: this is inherited stock, not a Tudor coinage for committee life.
The Middle English record keeps the older breadth. The word could mean two people finding each other, a rendezvous, a gathering, even a hunting party assembling before the chase. It could also mean a hostile encounter: a clash of spears, a fight with a boar, an armed meeting of adversaries. In religious calendars, Cristes meting named the feast of the Presentation, the moment in the story when the infant Christ is met in the temple. The later sense of a polite discussion around a table is a narrowing of that field, not the original centre.
The verb, the suffix, and a deeper root
The noun is a verbal noun from Old English mētan: to find, to fall in with, to come into the same place, sometimes even to obtain. That verb is inherited from Proto-Germanic mōtijaną, with close kin in Old Norse mæta, Old Frisian meta, Old Saxon motian, and Gothic gamotijan. Etymologists usually take the family back to an Indo-European root reconstructed as mod-, with a meaning in the area of meeting or assembling. Reconstructions of that depth are models, not inscriptions; the Germanic layer is the solid ground.
Morphology is straightforward and not folk etymology. English -ing here is the ordinary suffix that turns a verb into an event-noun or gerund. Speakers still form the participle and gerund of meet the same way, so the noun and the verb stay visibly related in a way that moot no longer is for most users.
That last comparison is the useful one. Old English ġemōt was a meeting in the institutional sense: a council, a formal assembly of freemen, a place where community business or judgment happened. Shortened, it gives modern moot. The witenagemot of Anglo-Saxon political history is the same root with different clothes. Meeting and moot are cousins from one Germanic assembly family, not two unrelated words that happen to share a modern meaning.
Cognates of the meet noun itself sit across the North Sea: West Frisian moeting, Dutch ontmoeting, older Low German mötinge, Danish møde, Swedish möte, Icelandic mót. The family kept the idea of an encounter or an assembled group. English did not need to import a Romance word for this job.
Two lookalikes are worth keeping separate. Old English also had a different mēting from a different mētan, “to draw or paint,” used of pictures rather than people. That noun did not become the modern English word under discussion. A later English meting, from mete in the sense of measuring or allotting, is a homophone, not an ancestor. Shared spelling in medieval manuscripts is not shared history.
How the sense moved toward the calendar
By about 1300 the related verb had senses of physical contact and of people approaching from opposite directions, including collision and combat. Later in that century it could mean coming upon something more abstract, as in meeting a fate. The intransitive use of people coming together is Middle English; the use of an organized body assembling dates from the early sixteenth century, close in time to a shift in the noun.
From the 1510s onward, sources record meeting as a gathering of people for discussion. That is the ancestor of the modern workplace sense, still an assembly, now framed as talk and decision rather than a hunt or a fight. In the seventeenth century, in England and Ireland, the same noun was widely used for worship gatherings of nonconformists. Most of those groups later preferred other labels. The Religious Society of Friends kept it. A Quaker meeting is still both the act of worship and, when qualified as monthly, quarterly, or yearly, a unit of church government. Meetinghouse grew in that same religious soil.
In early rural America the word could cover almost any assemblage for worship, including the revival and tent traditions later remembered in phrases such as Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. New England town meeting took the assembly sense into local civic life: not a private appointment, but the community gathered to decide. Those uses sit beside, rather than replace, the older meanings of encounter and confluence.
A nearby noun, meet without -ing, is later and narrower. In the nineteenth century it named a gathering of huntsmen, then other sporting assemblies. English kept both: the older verbal noun for discussion, worship, and chance encounter, and the clipped sporting meet for a field or a start line.
A word other languages borrowed back
English later exported the form. French, Italian, and several other languages took meeting as a loan, and in some Slavic languages a related borrowing often names a political rally more readily than a closed committee. The traffic is one-way in that direction: the English noun itself did not arrive from those languages. It had already been at home since before the Norman administrative vocabulary that supplies so many other English words for official gatherings.
The lasting fact is kinship, not office furniture. The same Germanic root that gave English a word for finding someone on the road also gave it moot, the old name for a council. A Tuesday slot on a calendar is a late, tidy use of an old assembly word.