What speakers mean now
Call something personal and you usually mean it belongs to one life rather than to a group, an office, or the public. A personal opinion is one speaker’s. Personal data are facts tied to an identifiable human. A personal visit is one you make yourself. The same adjective can mark intimacy, the body, or an insult aimed at someone’s character rather than at an argument. Grammar keeps a technical sense: personal pronouns stand for speaker, addressee, or someone spoken about. Law keeps another: personal property is the movable side of an estate, set against land.
Those uses look scattered until the history is lined up. The origin of the word personal is a Latin adjective built on the noun for a human being — and that noun itself began as a word for a stage mask.
A French and Latin loan
English did not inherit the adjective from Old English. It borrowed it in the later Middle English period, when clerks and translators were already handling French and Latin side by side. The Oxford English Dictionary treats the word as having more than one immediate source: Anglo-Norman and Middle French personel / personal, and Latin persōnālis. Merriam-Webster shortens the same path to Middle English from Anglo-French personel, from Late Latin personalis, from persona.
The earliest English evidence the OED cites is from before 1387, in John Trevisa’s translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon. Other standard dictionaries place first use in the late fourteenth century, which matches that witness. By then French already had a working adjective. Old French uses it of a verb that can be conjugated in each grammatical person as early as 1174. In legal French by 1283 it marks rights or actions that attach to a person rather than to a thing; around 1320 that legal sense appears as a noun. The everyday sense private, peculiar to one person is recorded in French around 1370.
So English did not invent a new idea. It took in a word that Romance law, grammar, and ordinary speech had already specialized, and it took it in while person itself — from Old French persone and Latin persona — had been in English since about 1200.
From mask to person to -al
The Latin adjective is transparent: persōna plus the suffix -ālis, of or relating to. English later analyzes the same pieces as person + -al, which is historically fair even though the whole word arrived ready-made.
Persōna is the harder step. In classical Latin it first names the mask that covered an actor’s whole head in later Roman theatre, then the role or character the mask stood for, and only after that a human being, a legal party, or a figure of dignity. Church Latin used the same noun for one of the Persons of the Trinity from the mid-thirteenth century in English, and earlier still in Latin: Tertullian already applies personalis to Trinitarian theology in the early third century. Classical Latin had already used persōnālis in narrower technical lanes, especially law and grammar. Lewis and Short record it of a right or benefit that belongs to a person, and of a verb that has first, second, and third persons.
Where persona itself came from is not settled. A Roman explanation, reported by Gellius from Gabius Bassus, tied it to personare, to sound through, as if the mask were a voice funnel. Nineteenth-century dictionaries often repeated that story. The long ō of persōna sits badly with that verb, and modern handbooks treat the link as unlikely. Several etymologists point instead to Etruscan phersu, long glossed as mask. Michiel de Vaan’s etymological dictionary of Latin simply has no entry: the word is not a tidy Indo-European inheritance.
Work on the Tarquinia tomb paintings is more cautious still. The painted figure labelled phersu is a masked ritual character; the Etruscan suffix -na marks belonging. A reconstructed phersuna would then mean that which belongs to Phersu, and Latin persona would be a borrowing of that form. On that account phersu may be a name or title rather than the common noun for a mask. The mask sense would be secondary. The Etruscan route is now the usual scholarly preference, but what phersu named, and how Romans first used the loan, remains partly open.
How the senses moved
Once English had the adjective, it did not stay on one track. The late-fourteenth-century core is already close to modern everyday use: private, belonging to a self-aware individual, or done by that individual in the flesh. Legal English kept the older contrast with real. Personal estate, personal effects, personal property: goods and certain interests that travel with a person, recovered by a personal action and passing to personal representatives, as opposed to land and rights in land. The paired term real here is from Latin res, a thing, not from royal.
Grammar kept the Latin and Old French technical sense. A personal pronoun or a personal verb is one that marks grammatical person. Theology kept the Trinitarian sense and, more broadly, the sense of having the status of a person.
A sharper social meaning appears in the 1610s: remarks directed at a particular human, usually in a hostile way. That is the line behind don’t get personal and a personal attack. The twentieth century added an official attached to someone’s person — personal secretary is cited from 1928 — and then the domestic machine: personal computer from 1976, a computer for one user rather than a shared mainframe.
As a noun the word is younger. Dictionaries date a newspaper sense to 1860, a classified advertisement addressed to an individual to 1861, and a short item about private doings to 1888. Those personals are leftover evidence of the private sense, not a new root.
Romance cognates track the same Latin adjective: Catalan personal in the fourteenth century, Italian personale by 1344, Spanish personal by 1495. French kept personnel as a spelling that English later borrowed again for staff. English personal and personnel are doublets: same Late Latin source, two French shapes, two jobs.
A useful leftover
The legal pair personal / real is the cleanest reminder that the adjective once meant attached to a person in a quite literal way — movable goods versus land — long before it meant too intimate to mention. The mask behind persona is a second reminder, and a less certain one: speakers who now guard their personal lives are using a word whose deepest noun may have named a face you put on, not the private self behind it.