A force toward you
In present-day English, to pull is to take hold of something and move it toward yourself, or toward whatever is applying the force. The same verb covers a trailer behind a car, a muscle that tears under strain, a crowd a performer draws in, a swallow of drink, and unofficial influence. Those later uses sit on an older core. The origin of the word pull is closer to a snatch or a stripping of something loose than to a long, even haul.
Inherited, not borrowed
English did not take the verb from French or Latin. It continues Old English pullian, a weak verb already in use in the Old English period, before 1100. Early senses point to plucking and drawing out: wool coming off, something yanked free. The standard Old English dictionary glosses the verb as to pull or pluck. Surviving passages include bats striking at faces and tugging, and a medical dream-book that treats a vision of pulling a sheep as an ill sign. Merriam-Webster places the first known use of the verb before the twelfth century. The Oxford English Dictionary likewise records the verb from Old English and treats the later noun as a separate, younger formation.
Middle English kept the inherited verb as pullen, with spellings such as pulle, pule, poule, and polle. The Middle English Dictionary derives that form directly from Old English pullian. Nothing in the morphology needs unpacking: there is no prefix or suffix that carries part of the meaning. The later noun is simply the verb reused as a name for the act, for a tool, or for an effect.
That noun is an English conversion. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence for it falls around 1303. Early uses include a fishing net and a turn at the action itself; by the late fourteenth century the word can mean a single act of pulling.
A trail that stops in Germanic
The deeper source is not settled. The Oxford English Dictionary marks the etymology as uncertain. Historical dictionaries often point, with caution, to a group of North Sea Germanic verbs that look similar and name related work: Low German pulen and West Frisian pûlje for shelling or husking, Middle Dutch polen for peeling or stripping, and Icelandic púla for hard labor or beating. Merriam-Webster notes a kinship with Middle Low German pulen in the sense of shelling or culling. These are plausible relatives, not a proven parent, and they do not yield a reconstructed Indo-European root that the major dictionaries agree on.
A few older notes compare Latin vello, to pluck out, and a proposed Indo-European root behind that Latin verb. That comparison has not become the standard account. It also sits beside a different Old English verb, pluccian, which meant to pluck, pull away, or tear, and which has its own Germanic relatives, including Icelandic plokka and German pflücken. Pull and pluck are neighbors in meaning. They are not the same word, and treating them as one history would flatten two separate stems.
From a snatch to a sustained draw
Oxford dictionaries observe that the sense moved from a short, sharp action—pluck, snatch—toward sustained force. The written record shows that shift in stages.
Around 1300, and a little earlier in surnames, English uses the verb for dragging something with effort. In the early fourteenth century it covers picking fruit, flowers, berries, and leaves by hand. By the middle of that century it means uprooting weeds or extracting a tooth, and also stripping someone of goods. Middle English writing is full of literal plucking: feathers from a bird, wool from a sheep, hair from a head. The same image turns figurative. To pull a person could mean to cheat or fleece them. A stock phrase about pulling a finch named a quiet swindle. Cookery and medicine keep the older texture as well: to pull a fowl was to strip it of feathers; the verb could also mean peeling onions or shelling an egg.
By about 1400 the verb can mean drawing someone or something toward oneself, and also worrying at something with the fingers. Mid-fifteenth-century use includes tearing to pieces. By the late sixteenth century pull had taken over much of the everyday ground that draw had held for these physical senses. Draw did not vanish, but pull became the ordinary word for a forceful tug.
The noun kept branching on its own. Beside the act itself, Middle English could use it for a brief span of time. By the late sixteenth century a pull could be a swallow of liquor. American English later made the noun mean personal influence, recorded in that sense by the 1880s, building on an older idea of having the power to pull rather than be pulled. Informal English then loaded the verb with later machinery and slang: trains that pull in or pull out, a difficult job pulled off, a joke that pulls someone’s leg. Those are recent growths on the same stem, not clues to the Old English starting point.
What the husk still shows
The safest historical picture is not a Latin loan and not a tidy Indo-European family tree. It is a native English verb whose oldest job looks more like stripping a husk or yanking wool than like towing a wagon. Even if the link to the continental husking verbs is only probable, that cluster keeps the older texture in view: pull began as a snatch, and only later became the ordinary English word for a long, steady draw.