In modern English a pikestaff is either the wooden shaft of a soldier’s pike or a walking stick with a metal spike at the lower end, meant to bite into ice, mud, or loose ground. Both senses describe a long pole that ends in a point. The origin of the word pikestaff is not a borrowing of some ready-made foreign compound. English built it at home, in the later Middle Ages, by putting two older nouns together.
A home-grown compound
Dictionaries reconstruct the immediate source as Middle English pykstaf, also written pyk-staf, pikstef, and other close spellings. The form is a transparent join of pike and staff. Several standard dictionaries place first use in the period 1325–1375. Independent medieval evidence lines up with that window: a London record of 1356 lists a pikstef among weapons, and the Middle English Dictionary notes the surname Pyckstave even earlier in the fourteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary, working from a different set of printed citations, gives its earliest secure literary use before 1500. The dates do not so much contradict one another as show how slowly a workaday compound can surface in the books lexicographers prefer.
What the compound meant first was not automatically the infantry weapon of later centuries. In Middle English a pyk-staf was a spiked staff, often the kind a pilgrim carried, with an iron point that could be planted in the road. That walking-staff sense is still one of the two living definitions, and Merriam-Webster treats it as the earliest recorded meaning.
The first half: pike
Pike in this compound is the older English word for a spike or pointed tip, not the French infantry spear that arrived later. That spike-word appears in early Middle English as pik, pyk, or pic, and it continues Old English pīc, a pointed object or pickaxe. Etymologists treat it as a West Germanic item — reconstructions of the Proto-Germanic form run along the lines of pīkaz — pulled about by neighbours. Old French pic, Old Norse forms, and Middle Dutch picke and pecke all sit in the same cluster. Old English pīc may itself owe something to a Celtic source; Gaelic pic and Irish pice are regularly cited. The honest account is mixed influence, not a single clean loan.
From the same stock English also has pick, and for a long stretch pike, pick, and pitch were used with overlapping senses of a pointed tool or a pointed end. Dutch piek and Danish pig keep the point meaning in related languages. German Pike, by contrast, names the infantry weapon and was taken from French pique rather than inherited as the old spike-word.
The long infantry pike — a thrusting spear with a small metal head on a shaft that could run to eighteen feet — is a later arrival in English, from French pique, itself from piquer, to pierce. That military sense is first recorded around the early sixteenth century. Only then could pikestaff be reread as the staff of a pike. Some desk dictionaries date the weapon-shaft reading to the late sixteenth century. The walking-staff compound is older; the military reading is a second pass over the same two English pieces.
The second half: staff
Staff is native. Middle English staf continues Old English stæf: a walking stick, a carrying pole, a rod used as a weapon, or a pastoral staff. Behind it stands Proto-Germanic stabaz, from a Proto-Indo-European root stebh- concerned with posts, stems, and setting something firmly in place. The Germanic family is easy to see: German Stab, Dutch staf, Old Norse stafr, Danish and Swedish stav. Among the non-Germanic relatives usually offered for the same root are Lithuanian stiebas, a staff or pillar, and Old Church Slavonic stoboru, a pillar. Despite the tempting overlap in sense, the word is not related to stiff.
Because staff once made an irregular plural staves, the compound still allows pikestaves beside the regular pikestaffs. That fossil is a reminder that the second element is the old native noun, not a later borrowing.
Two objects, one name
By the time nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dictionaries set the word down, both objects were listed: a traveller’s staff with an iron or steel point at the bottom, and the wooden handle of an infantry pike. Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary recorded only the military shaft. Later editions restored the spiked walking stick, the sense medieval evidence supports first.
The two meanings are not a dramatic semantic drift so much as a fork. The first half of the compound always meant point. When the point was a ferrule on a pilgrim’s stick, the word named a walking aid. When the point was the head of a military pike, it named the shaft that held that head. English did not need a new word for the second object; it reused the compound it already had.
The infantry pike itself faded from European armies in the eighteenth century as the bayonet took over close fighting. The traveller’s spiked staff lasted longer in description than in daily use. What kept the word in ordinary speech was not either object, but a simile.
As plain as the pole in your hand
From the mid-sixteenth century English could call something obvious as plain as a packstaff. A packstaff was the pole a pedlar used to carry a pack of goods, or to rest that pack when he stopped. Thomas Becon uses the packstaff version in 1546, and later sixteenth-century satirists still write of verse that is pack-staff plain.
By the seventeenth century the same simile often appears with pikestaff instead. An English version of Terence printed in 1641 already has the pikestaff wording. Some reference works call that substitution a corruption of packstaff. Others note that the swap has no documented motive beyond the likeness of the two words and the fact that a pikestaff, like a packstaff, was an unadorned wooden pole. Both explanations can be true at once: speakers mixed two familiar staff-words, and the new version still made sense because a pikestaff is visually simple. The phrase also picked up a second, related use: not only obvious, but plain-looking, even unattractive.
That is the part of the history still in the language. The infantry shaft and the pilgrim’s spike survive in specialist description. The simile is what most readers now meet. A fourteenth-century compound of spike and stick ended up naming obviousness, because the object itself had so little ornament that nobody could miss it.