Prepared, willing, and at hand
In present-day English, ready names a state of fitness more often than a single concrete object. A meal is ready when it can be served. A person is ready when the work can start, or when the mind is willing. Money is ready when it can be spent at once. The same adjective also marks speed of thought or speech: a ready answer, a ready wit. None of those uses is a late import. The word is native Germanic stock that English has kept from the Old English period, then reshaped in the Middle English centuries by adding a familiar ending.
A native adjective with a new ending
The form speakers now write is Middle English. Writers of that period took Old English rǣde and ġerǣde, already meaning prepared, prompt, or suitably equipped, and recast them with the adjectival suffix that also appears in hungry, crafty, and busy. Early records still show spellings such as rædi, redy, and iredi. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence for this reshaped adjective is around 1175, in the Ormulum. Other dictionary dates cluster in the same window, about 1150–1200.
That path is inheritance, not borrowing. Nothing in the core history comes from French or Latin. The older English pair already covered fitness for a task; of a horse, rǣde could mean fit to be ridden or already mounted. The ġe- on ġerǣde is the same kind of Germanic prefix that still sits on Dutch gereed. English later dropped that prefix from the everyday adjective and kept the shorter stem plus the new -y. The vowel was lengthened in writing as the ending changed.
Standard references describe the formation in two overlapping ways. Either Middle English built the word inside English from rǣde plus the suffix, or the modern shape is a variant of a related form i-redy. Those are two accounts of the same native material, not two foreign sources.
Arrangement, riding, or both
Behind the Old English adjectives stands a Germanic reconstruction, given in slightly different shapes as *(ga)raitha-, *raidaz, or *garaidijaz. The agreed core is arranged, ordered, put into condition. That Germanic step is not in serious dispute. The Indo-European step beneath it is.
Some dictionaries, including American Heritage, tie the family to the root *reidh-, the same stock that yields English ride. Etymonline treats that link as possible rather than proven. The Old English sense of a horse prepared for riding makes the connection tempting: to be ready, on that view, is to be set to go. Other treatments, including the reconstruction on Wiktionary, start from a root for counting, ordering, and making comfortable and treat the riding root as a later blend, especially in the horse-related sense. The two stories have not been fully reconciled. What can be said without forcing a choice is that Germanic speakers used this cluster for things put in order and for things prepared to move.
Cognates make the family easy to see even when the deeper root is left open. German bereit, Dutch gereed, West Frisian ree, Old Frisian rede, Old Norse greiðr, Swedish redo, Danish rede, Gothic garaiþs, and Scots readie all belong here. Icelandic greiður keeps a sense closer to easy or unobstructed than to a starter’s command. The shared picture is order and availability.
Old English rǣdan, to arrange or to counsel, may have colored the adjective; it is related to ġerǣde rather than a separate donor. A northern dialect verb redd, as in redd up for tidying, sits nearby. Standard accounts warn that the exact relationship among redd, rid, and ready is unclear, and that some senses of redd drifted toward unrelated rid. Those side paths are worth noting and then leaving alone.
From horses and gear to cash and commands
Once the Middle English form was in place, the adjective spread from being prepared to being present. By the late twelfth century it could mean at hand. Around 1300 it applied to money that could be paid immediately, and from the 1680s slang used the ready as a noun for cash in hand. The same period yields an adverbial use with the sense at hand. A later military phrase, at the ready, is recorded from 1837 for the position of a firearm after the command to make ready.
The verb followed the adjective rather than the other way around. Early thirteenth-century redien could mean to administer, a sense that died. Around 1300 it could mean to take aim. By the mid-fourteenth century it meant to put something into proper condition, the sense that survived. The OED notes that this verb was uncommon between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dutch reeden and German bereiten show a matching prepare development on cognate stems.
Other modern uses grew from the same core without needing a new etymology. Ready to believe is willingness. Ready to collapse is likelihood at any moment. A ready writer is prompt rather than hesitant. Compounds such as ready-made treat the work as already done for the user. A ready-reckoner, recorded in 1757, was a handbook of tabulated calculations for ordinary business and housekeeping: readiness as a printed shortcut.
The older Old English range also included skilled, simple, and easy. Those shades faded as prepared, willing, and available took the center. The riding sense did not vanish so much as it generalized. A horse fit to go became a person, a tool, or a sum of money fit to be used.
What Dutch still shows
Dutch gereed is a useful reminder of a shape English discarded. It keeps the old prefix that Old English had in ġerǣde, while English kept the shorter stem and added -y. German bereit took a different prefix on the same root and still means prepared. The origin of the word ready is therefore not a tale of borrowing. It is a native adjective that changed its ending, dropped a prefix, and stretched from gear set in order, and from horses equipped to ride, to cash on the table and a mind already willing to act.