A verb that still keeps its point
In present-day English, pick covers a cluster of ordinary acts: choosing one thing from several, pulling fruit from a plant, working at something with a fingertip or a pointed tool, opening a lock without a key, or plucking the strings of a guitar. As a noun it can mean the digging tool itself, a guitar plectrum, the right of first choice, or the choicest item in a group. Those uses look scattered until they are set against an older idea: a sharp point making contact, then the fingers doing the same work.
Germanic, with a disputed French edge
The origin of the word pick is usually told as a Germanic story rather than a French one. The verb is first visible in English in the early thirteenth century as picken, already meaning to peck, and around 1300 as piken, to work with a pick or to dig. Behind those Middle English spellings sit two close relatives that seem to have fused. One is an Old English verb reconstructed as pician or pīcian, inferred from picung, an eighth-century gloss on Latin stigmata that meant a piercing or pricking. The other is Old Norse pikka, to prick or peck. Old English also had pȳcan in the same range of prick, pluck, and pick.
That fusion is the usual account in historical dictionaries. A minority line, still printed in the American Heritage Dictionary, treats Old French piquer, to pierce, as a co-source of Middle English piken, and traces the French verb to Vulgar Latin piccāre. Other references allow French influence at the edge of the English word but do not treat piquer as its parent. The French verb itself is widely taken to rest on a Germanic loan into Romance, so even if contact mattered, English was not simply borrowing a Latinate newcomer.
A reconstructed pecking stem
Comparativists set the English verb under Proto-West Germanic pikkōn and Proto-Germanic pikkōną, a weak verb meaning to pick, peck, prick, or knock. The stem pikk- is not securely tied to a deeper Indo-European root. Some handbooks float a connection with a sound-symbolic base of the sort sometimes written bew- or bu-, for a dull knock. The reconstruction pages that actually host pikkōną treat the origin as unknown and apparently imitative. That caution is the safer one. The sound of a beak or a point striking a surface is a plausible source for a family of short, sharp verbs, and it is better to leave the prehistory open than to force a tidy ancestor.
Cognates keep the same shape across the North Sea. Dutch pikken, German picken, West Frisian pikje, Icelandic pikka, Swedish picka, and Danish pikke all sit in the peck-and-prick range. English peck is a close relative, possibly reinforced by Middle Dutch or Middle Low German forms with e rather than i. The family is morphological in a modest way: a verbal stem plus the ordinary Germanic weak-verb suffix, not a prefix-plus-root compound.
The noun pick meaning a pointed iron tool for breaking rock or ground is a slightly different story. It appears around 1200 and is treated as a variant of pike, from Old English pīc, a pointed object or pickaxe, a word that has its own traffic with Celtic and French lookalikes. Many other noun senses grow out of the verb rather than from that tool-name: a blow with a point, the working end of a toothpick, a lock-picking tool, a guitar pick from the 1890s, a basketball screen from the mid-twentieth century.
From pecking to choosing
Once the verb is in Middle English, the senses fan out in a readable order. The early fourteenth century brings both piercing with a pointed instrument and plucking with the hand: gathering fruit, breaking something off, collecting. From that finger-work comes, by the late fourteenth century, the meaning that now dominates ordinary speech: to choose, to sort through in search of what is worth keeping. The same century also shows a criminal sense. Around 1300 the verb could mean to rob or plunder; by the late 1300s it had cooled into petty theft, the ancestor of picking a pocket. To pick on someone, to single them out for harsh attention, is already late fourteenth century.
Later layers stay close to the same gestures. Early fifteenth century: probing a lock with a point. Mid-fifteenth: picking a quarrel, and picking one's nose. By the 1580s, eating in small bites. The seventeenth century adds pick and choose — the reverse order, choose and pick, is older, around 1400 — and pick at in the sense of nagging fault-finding. Banjo and guitar picking is recorded from the nineteenth century. Nouns follow the verbs: first choice by the 1770s, the choicest example in the nineteenth century.
A separate, mostly dialectal pick meaning to throw is a variant of pitch, not a child of the pecking verb. Historical dictionaries keep that item apart, and everyday English has largely let it go.
What the cousins still show
The useful reminder is not that pick means choose. It is that the choosing sense is a late medieval specialization of plucking, and that plucking itself is a human version of pecking. German picken still leans toward the bird. English kept the bird and then put the same verb to work on fruit, pockets, locks, strings, and finally on decisions. French piquer looks similar because Romance borrowed the Germanic knock, not because English waited for Paris. The eighth-century gloss picung is already there, naming a prick, centuries before anyone used pick for a careful selection.