What speakers do with it now
In current English, to offer is to put something in front of another person so that it can be taken or refused: a job, a drink, a suggestion, help, a price. The noun names that proposal. In law it can be the definite invitation that becomes a contract if the other side accepts. In trade it can be the figure a buyer names, or the terms a seller puts on goods. The same verb still covers an older, quieter use: to present a prayer or a gift in worship. That religious sense is not a later flourish. It is how the word first lived in English.
A church loan, not a home-grown Germanic verb
English did not coin this verb from native roots. Old English already had offrian, a weak verb used for presenting something, above all as a sacrifice or oblation. Standard dictionaries place that use before the twelfth century, which means it belongs to Old English itself rather than to the later Norman wave of vocabulary.
The source was Latin offerre. In classical Latin the verb meant to bring before, to present, to show, even to inflict. In Late and ecclesiastical Latin it specialized as presenting something in worship: to dedicate, to consecrate, to sacrifice. Christian Latin carried that religious verb into several Germanic languages at once. Old Frisian had offria, Middle Dutch offeren, Old Norse offra, and the line that yields German opfern. Old English fitted the loan to its own grammar. The infinitive ending -ian is a native weak-verb marker, not a piece of the Latin stem.
The image inside the Latin word is physical. Offerre is the prefix ob- (toward, in front of) plus ferre (to bring, to carry). Before f the prefix assimilates, which is why the English spelling has a double f. The same carrying verb sits under English refer, confer, transfer, prefer, and suffer. Behind ferre lies the Indo-European root reconstructed as *bher-, the source of English bear in the sense of carrying a load, and of related forms such as Sanskrit bharati and Greek pherein.
Two doors, one Latin ancestor
Anyone tracing the origin of the word offer meets two arrivals, not one. The religious verb is the older English inheritance from Latin through Old English. The everyday range—placing a proposal on the table, volunteering to do something, naming a price—was added or strengthened later by contact with Old French offrir and the related noun ofre (later offre). Middle English used offeren for the verb.
Major dictionaries tell the same double story in slightly different wording. Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary treat the worship sense as coming through Old English offrian, and the remaining senses as coming through Anglo-French or Old French. Etymonline and Oxford describe French as a reinforcement of the secular range rather than as a second, unrelated word. The Oxford English Dictionary, as cited in later discussion of the Old English form, is explicit: French did not replace the Latin loan; it widened it.
Romance cousins keep the same Latin parent in view. French offrir, Italian offrire, Spanish ofrecer, and Catalan oferir all go back to offerre, some of them through a later infinitive reshaped in spoken Latin. English is unusual in having taken the word twice: first from church Latin into Old English, then again, for sense, from French.
The noun took a different path
The verb and the noun do not have identical paper trails. Most references derive Middle English offre, recorded in the early fifteenth century, from Old French ofre, a verbal noun meaning a proposition or the act of offering. The home-grown English noun from the same root is offering, from late Old English offrung. For a long time that native noun meant a gift presented to a deity. Only later did it cover a presentation to a person, and later still a presentation to the public—entertainment, a publication, goods for sale.
The split is still audible. An offering still leans toward what is given up. An offer leans toward what may be accepted or declined. Wiktionary’s English noun entry sometimes traces offer to the Old English verb rather than to French offre. That sketch sits beside, not above, the dictionary consensus, and it may be blending the verb’s history with the noun’s. The safer account is the double one: inherited church verb, French-shaped secular noun, both ultimately from Latin offerre.
How the sense moved off the altar
By the early fifteenth century English also used the verb for presenting something to be accepted or refused. In the 1530s it could mean to attempt something. A price proposed in a bargain is attested from the 1540s. Putting merchandise out for sale is a seventeenth-century commercial development, from the 1630s.
Other branches grew beside the marketplace. To offer resistance is to put force in someone’s way. An opportunity that offered, in older prose, was one that presented itself. The obsolete idiom to offer at something meant to make an attempt at it. None of these need a folk story. They are the same “bring before” image applied to a fight, a chance, or a try.
A morphological leftover sits in the Latin perfect stem. The participle of offerre is oblatus, which English keeps in oblation and, through church Latin, in offertory. Those words stayed closer to the altar. Offer itself walked out of the sanctuary and into shops, contracts, and ordinary conversation. Proffer, borrowed from French poroffrir, is a close cousin that still stresses holding something out.
What the Germanic family kept
If you want a reminder of the word’s first English job, look at the cognates that never fully secularized. Dutch offer and German Opfer still mean a sacrifice or a victim. Danish offer does similar work. English kept the old religious verb and then, under French pressure, let the everyday proposal become the dominant meaning.
The useful dating is simple. The altar sense is the older English use, already in Old English offrian. The job offer and the sale price are the later overlay, fed by French, on a Latin verb that literally meant to carry something toward someone.