In present-day English a question is first of all an interrogative: a sentence, clause, or even a single word that asks for information. It is also the matter under discussion, the point still open, and, as a verb, the act of putting inquiries to a person or of withholding assent from a claim. Those uses look ordinary. Historically they sit on a much older idea of seeking, including the kind of seeking done in a courtroom.
A learned borrowing, twice over
The origin of the word question is a borrowing, not a native Germanic inheritance. It enters written English in the early thirteenth century, during the long intake of French legal, clerical, and scholarly vocabulary into Middle English. The immediate sources are Anglo-French questiun and Old French question. Standard dictionaries date the English noun to the thirteenth century; the Oxford record places an early form around 1225. The same dictionaries also treat Latin as a parallel donor, so English received the word both through French and, in learned use, more directly from Latin.
Old English already had a word for asking, āscung, built on the verb that later yields ask. Question did not erase that native stock, but it took a large share of the more formal and technical ground: disputation, law, and later the classroom interrogative.
French itself had borrowed the noun from Latin. Because it arrived as a learned word, French kept the preconsonantal s that everyday speech often dropped. The vernacular relative is quête, a quest or collection, from the same family without that s. English question still carries the learned shape.
Latin morphology: a seeking made into a noun
Behind French question stands Latin quaestio, cited in the accusative quaestionem because that is the form Romance nouns usually continue. In Latin the word named a seeking, an inquiry, an examining, and a judicial investigation. It is an action noun formed on the past-participle stem of quaerere, to seek or to ask. The suffix is the familiar -io / -ionem that English later spells -ion.
That Latin verb is unusually productive in English. From it come quest, query, request, inquire, acquire, require, and inquest. At a longer stretch sit exquisite, something sought out with care, and conquer, whose older sense is to gain by seeking or striving. Question belongs in that cluster: not a native interrogative particle, but a noun of investigation that English later used for ordinary asking.
Romance cognates stay close: French question, Spanish cuestión, Italian questione, Portuguese questão. Neighboring Germanic languages also took the Latin noun rather than inheriting a shared root; Middle Low German has quēstie and Middle High German questje, both meaning an inquiry. English quest is a sibling from the same Latin stem, not a folk-etymology of question.
The deeper ancestry of quaerere is unsettled. One line of reconstruction ties it to the Proto-Indo-European stem of relative and interrogative pronouns. Another proposes a Proto-Italic form from a root meaning to acquire. Neither account is firm. What can be stated without guesswork stops at Latin: a verb of seeking that produced an action noun, which French and English then specialized as the ordinary word for an inquiry.
From scholastic problem to everyday interrogative
The earliest English sense is narrower than the modern classroom question. In the early 1200s a questioun was often a philosophical or theological problem, especially one framed as an interrogative for disputation. By the early fourteenth century the word also meant an utterance meant to draw an answer or a discussion, and, beside that, a difficulty or a doubt. Middle English stretched it still further into verbal contention, debate, legal proceedings, litigation, and accusation. The courtroom never quite left the word.
For a long stretch, to put a person to the question could mean interrogation under torture. Historical dictionaries still list that sense; it is now archaic, but it is not a metaphor invented by later writers. It continues the Latin judicial investigation. An obsolete sense meaning talk, conversation, or speech appears in early modern English and then fades.
The verb is later than the noun. Late in the fifteenth century English has questiounen, formed partly by converting the noun and partly by taking Old French questionner, already current in the thirteenth century for asking, interrogating, and again for torturing. From inquire in order to know, the English verb develops, by the 1530s, the sense to dispute or to doubt. That split is still live: one can question a witness and question a premise with the same spelling.
Phrases that keep the older senses
Fixed expressions map the rest of the change. A question of, a dispute about something, is recorded from the early fifteenth century. No question, meaning without doubt, appears in the mid-1400s. To be in question, under discussion or consideration, is from the 1610s. Out of the question starts around 1700 as not pertinent to the matter and then settles into not to be considered. No questions asked, a promise that returning lost or stolen goods will not bring an inquiry, is a newspaper formula from 1879.
The punctuation mark is named late. English had interrogation point from the 1590s; question mark is recorded from 1849, with question stop as a short-lived rival in the 1860s. A figurative question mark, something wrapped in uncertainty, follows in 1869.
What remains most telling is not the punctuation but the legal residue. When a meeting puts the question to a vote, or a historian writes that a prisoner was put to the question, the same Latin investigation is still at work under the everyday request for an answer.