English speakers lean on this short word for almost everything that can be small, sharp, or decisive. A needle has one. A coastline can end in one. A debate has one. A game is won by them. In geometry it is a location without size; in everyday talk it is the thing that matters. That range looks chaotic until the history is lined up: two French nouns, both built on a Latin verb meaning to prick, arrived in Middle English and then fused.
Two French words, one English spelling
The origin of the word point is not a single borrowing. Around 1200, Middle English already had forms such as pointe covering a minute amount, a single item inside a larger whole, and the sharp end of a weapon. Historical dictionaries place the English noun in the early thirteenth century, with evidence around 1225 in the Ancrene Riwle and other notices clustering between the late twelfth century and about 1200. The word is a loan, not a native Old English inheritance.
What English borrowed was already a pair. Old French point, a masculine noun, meant a dot or the smallest quantity. It came from Latin punctum, the neuter past participle of pungere, to prick or pierce, used as a noun for a tiny hole made by a stab and then for anything that looked like one: a speck, a particle, a mark. That French form is the source of the English senses that cluster around a spot, an instant, and a negligible amount. The use for a tiny quantity is dated to about 1300; the sense of a small mark or dot follows in the mid-fourteenth century.
Beside it stood Old French pointe, feminine, for the tip of a weapon and, by extension, the leading edge of an army. That noun reflects Medieval Latin puncta, the feminine past participle of the same verb, specialized as a sharp tip. English took this form in the early fourteenth century. In modern French the split is still alive: point is the dot, the moment, the score; pointe is the tapering end. English spelling and sound collapsed the two, so a single word now does both jobs. In the French of medieval England the gender distinction could not be kept, and the spellings (poynt, poent, poinct, pointe, and many more) spilled into one another.
Some later uses may also have been formed inside English by converting the verb. That is a cautious extra, not a rival to the French loans.
From a prick to a participle
Latin pungere is the hinge. Its past participles became nouns: punctum for the hole or the mark, puncta for the tip. The verb itself belongs to a nasalized form of a Proto-Indo-European root usually reconstructed as *peuk- or *peug- (another transcription is *pewǵ-), meaning to prick. English point is traced to that nasalized zero-grade *pu-n-g-, the shape that yields Latin pungere.
Related Latin and English words keep the same physical image. Puncture is a hole made by a point. Pungent once described things that literally pricked and later the bite of a smell or taste. Punctuation and punctuate treat text as something marked with points. Punctual began as a word about a point and later came to mean arriving exactly then. Poignant came through French from the same verb and still carries a sense of piercing feeling. Further out, Latin pugnus, fist, and pugnare, to fight, give pugnacious and pugilist; Greek pygmē, fist, sits on the same root. Those fist words are cousins, not descendants of the English noun, but they show how a root for pricking and striking spread.
Romance languages kept the old split more clearly than English did. Spanish punto and punta, Italian punto and punta, match the French pair: the mark versus the tip. English relatives such as punch, in the sense of a tool that makes a hole, belong to the same Latin family by a different route.
How the senses fanned out
Once the two French nouns were in Middle English, extension followed a simple pattern: a tiny, separate item inside a larger whole. A brief period of time, an instant, is recorded from the late fourteenth century. The matter under discussion, the point of an argument, appears in the same period. A distinguishing feature, especially a good one, is late fifteenth century. A peak of land or a coastal promontory is from the 1550s: the land itself tapers like a weapon.
Later technical senses keep recycling the same ideas of a mark or a unit. A diacritical mark for a vowel is from the 1610s. A unit of score in a game is recorded from 1746. A recognized unit of price movement on an exchange is by 1814. Printers’ type, one twelfth of a pica in British and American use, is cited in the United States from 1883. A hundredth of a carat for gemstones is from 1931. Phrases travel with the noun as well. Point of honor, early seventeenth century, calques French point d’honneur. Point of no return, 1941, began as an aviation term for the place in a flight past which turning back is no longer practical. The everyday sense of purpose or advantage, often negative as in asking what the point is, is recorded by 1903.
The verb is slightly later than the noun. Late fourteenth century it means to indicate with the finger. Around 1400 it can mean to wound by stabbing, to mark pauses in reading, or to fill joints. Those uses come partly from Old French pointoier, to prick, stab, or mark, and partly from the English noun. Aiming or directing toward an object is late fifteenth century. To point out, in the sense of making something plain, is from the 1570s.
What French still separates
The useful reminder is not a list of dates but a contrast English speakers no longer hear. French still has two words; English has one spelling for the hole, the dot, the tip of a sword, the headland, the score, and the gist of a remark. That merger is why a word that began as a prick in Latin can now name both a decimal mark and the reason for saying anything at all.