What English does with miss
In current English, miss names several kinds of failure that still belong together. You can miss a target, a catch, a train, a class, a deadline, or the point of a remark. You can miss a person after they leave. As a noun, a miss is a shot that does not land or a plan that does not come off. In each case something aimed at, expected, or wanted fails to connect.
The courtesy title Miss is a separate word. It was shortened from mistress in the seventeenth century and later settled as a form of address for a girl or an unmarried woman. Once that homonym is set aside, the origin of the word miss is a native Germanic story, not a clipping of a title.
Inherited, not imported
English already had the verb in the Old English period. Missan meant to fail to hit a mark, to fall short of an aim, and to slip past someone's notice. The Oxford English Dictionary records it before 1150 and treats it as a word inherited from Germanic. Merriam-Webster and American Heritage take the same path: Middle English missen from Old English missan, with the first known use before the twelfth century.
The older forms are reconstructed. Proto-West Germanic *missijan and Proto-Germanic *missijaną meant to go wrong or to fail, and the Germanic verb often took a genitive object in the sense “to miss.” Parallel verbs survive across the family: Old Frisian missa and modern West Frisian misse, Middle Dutch and Dutch missen, Old High German missen and German missen, Old Icelandic missa. Danish and Norwegian miste belong nearby in the sense of losing or being without. Swedish missa in the “fail to hit” sense looks like a twin, but the OED notes that this Swedish verb is a nineteenth-century borrowing from English, so it should not be counted as an independent cognate.
Norse still left a mark inside English. Several etymologies say native missan was reinforced by cognate Old Norse missa, which covered missing, lacking, and losing. For the noun the OED is more cautious: it calls English miss of mixed origin, partly converted from the verb and probably partly taken from early Scandinavian. The verb itself remains inherited stock.
The same stem as mis-
The verb is built on Germanic *missa-, a stem that meant roughly “in a changed manner,” then “abnormally,” “astray,” or “wrongly.” That is the same material as the English prefix mis- in mistake, mislead, and misplace, and as the adverb amiss. The morphology is ordinary: a weak verb formed from that “divergent, wrong” stem with the familiar *-jan suffix. Nothing in the history supports a folk tale that the feeling of absence came first, or that the verb grew out of the title Miss.
The step beyond Germanic is less settled. American Heritage points to the Indo-European root *mei- in its appendix. Etymonline does the same, taking the root as change, going, or moving, and reading *missa- as “done otherwise,” hence wrongly. Wiktionary prefers an extended root *meyth₂- for change, exchange, or trade, and derives *missijaną from an adjective *missaz “alternate, aberrant, wrong.” Those reconstructions sit close together rather than in open conflict: both start from difference or deviation. From “done otherwise” it is a short step to “done wrongly,” and from there to failing to land where intended. The Germanic link to mis- is the solid part. The precise Proto-Indo-European ancestor is hypothesized.
From a missed mark to a felt gap
Old English already used the verb for a mark that was not hit. It could also mean to go wrong or to err, a sense now rare, and to be absent or wanting. Early English sometimes marked the object of the hit-sense in the genitive, a pattern later dropped. A prefixed form gemissan is attested once in late Old English, in a life of St. Giles, still with the sense of failing to hit.
Middle English spread the verb across neighboring ideas of not connecting. By the late twelfth century it is used for failing to find a person or a thing. Early in the thirteenth it covers failing to notice or perceive. By the middle of that century it means failing to reach or obtain what one wants. Around 1300 the affective sense is in place: to perceive someone's absence with regret. Leaving something out, skipping it, is attested by the mid-fourteenth century. Escaping or avoiding is from the 1520s. Being too late for a scheduled thing is modern, from 1823. The figurative phrase miss the boat, first as nautical slang for arriving too late, is recorded from 1929, the same stretch as miss out (on).
The noun tracks the same line. Old English miss already meant absence or loss. In the late twelfth century it is found as loss or lack; around 1200 it can name the regret that follows. The act of missing, or the state of being without, appears in the late fifteenth century. A miss as a failure to hit or attain is from the 1550s. The OED lists many noun senses, a large share of them now obsolete, which shows how closely lack, error, and a shot that does not land once sat.
What looks like a leap from archery to homesickness is movement along one path. You do not meet the thing. You notice that it is not there. The gap itself becomes something you feel. Hitting and lacking both start from going off the intended course.
A cleaner relative than the title
Readers who meet Miss on an envelope are looking at a clipping of mistress, later narrowed to young or unmarried women. That honorific never fed the verb.
A more useful relative is still in daily use. Every time English flags a wrong turn with the prefix mis-, it is drawing on the same Germanic base that gave speakers miss: the shot that does not land, the train that leaves without you, and the person whose absence you notice.