What the word covers now
In present-day English, mind names the inner life of a person: thought, feeling, will, memory, and attention. We speak of a sharp mind, a change of mind, a frame of mind, and of keeping something in mind. The noun can also stand for a person of intellect, and in philosophy it is the usual label for consciousness as distinct from the body. A related verb, to mind, means to notice, to object, or to look after. Those later uses grew out of the noun rather than arriving as a separate loan.
The origin of the word mind is native. English did not borrow it from Latin or French. It is an inherited Germanic noun, already in the language in the Old English period, and its earliest job was memory rather than abstract psychology.
From gemynd to mind
The usual Old English form was gemynd. Historical dictionaries treat it as a word for memory, remembrance, and the state of being remembered, and also for thought, purpose, and conscious intellect. A shorter form, mynd, already existed beside it. In ordinary Old English prose the everyday word for the inner self was often mōd, the ancestor of modern mood. Gemynd belonged especially to recollection; using it for the thinking self shows up in poetry and in set phrases.
The ge- at the front is the same unstressed Germanic prefix that later appears in Middle English as i- or y- and then falls away. The modern noun is therefore an aphetic reduction of an older i-mind, itself the continuation of gemynd. By the late twelfth century the reduced shape mynd is on record. Middle English spellings include minde, munde, miende, and related forms. Scots keeps mind as well.
This is inheritance, not borrowing. The word did not enter English through Norman French. It was already present before 1150, and the later spelling mind is the same native stem after the prefix faded and the vowel shifted.
A thinking root, with a prefix
Behind Old English gemynd stand Proto-West Germanic gamundi and Proto-Germanic gamundiz, a compound of the prefix ga- plus a noun mundiz meaning memory or remembrance. That noun is commonly traced to a Proto-Indo-European abstract méntis, thought, built on the root men-, to think. The same root, with different suffixes, yields a large family of mental words across the Indo-European languages.
Cognates make the connection visible. Gothic has gamunds for remembrance. Old High German has gimunt for memory. Old Norse minni, still reflected in Swedish minne and Icelandic minni, means memory. Latin mens, the source of English mental, is a sibling rather than a parent: English mind is not taken from Latin, but both continue the same older root. Sanskrit manas names mind or spirit. Greek menos covers spirit and resolve, and related Greek forms give mania and the memory-goddess Mnemosyne. Lithuanian mintis is thought; Slavic languages keep verbs and nouns of thinking and remembering from the same stock.
The ge- or ga- prefix is worth a sentence of caution. In Germanic it often marks a completed or collective sense, and on this noun it belongs to the inherited formation. It is not a modern English prefix glued onto mind. Once the prefix weakened and dropped, speakers were left with the bare stem.
Sources agree on the Germanic path and on the Indo-European thinking root. They differ slightly in how they label the last reconstructed step: some write a suffixed form of men- without naming méntis; others reconstruct méntis explicitly. That is a difference of reconstruction, not a rival story about how the English word arrived.
Memory first, then the inner faculty
The oldest core is memory. That sense has not vanished, but it survives mainly in fixed phrases: bear in mind, call to mind, keep in mind, time out of mind. From about 1300 the noun is used for the thinking process itself and for intention or purpose. By the late fourteenth century it can mean a frame of mind, a disposition, a way of thinking, or an opinion. Out of one's mind for madness is late fourteenth century; out of mind for forgotten is earlier, around 1300. Mind's eye, mental vision, appears in the early fifteenth century.
The verb follows the noun. In the mid-fourteenth century to mind means to remember. Old English already had related verbs, myngian and myndgian, to remind. Later English extended the verb to noticing (late fifteenth century), paying heed (sixteenth), objecting or disliking (around 1600), and looking after someone (late seventeenth). Never mind is eighteenth century. The dialectal pay no mind is recorded in American English in the early twentieth century.
One Germanic cousin shows how far a memory-word can drift. Archaic German Minne meant love, originally a loving remembrance. English took a different turn: from remembrance toward the faculty that remembers, then toward opinion, intention, and care.
What still gives the date away
If you want a single dating to hold onto, take this: the intellect sense of mind is Middle English, but the word itself is older than that sense. Before 900, English already had gemynd, and its first job was to name memory. The phrases that still ask us to keep something in mind are not decorative extras. They are the oldest meaning, still audible after the prefix fell off and the faculty of thought took over the noun.