A measure of what does not reach
In present-day English, short names a deficit of length, height, or time. A board can be short. A person can be short. A meeting can be short. The same adjective also marks lack of supply, a manner that is clipped or rude, a pastry that crumbles, a vowel held only briefly, and, in later technical use, a circuit that takes an unintended path or a market position that profits if a price falls. The core idea is stable: something does not run the full distance.
That range looks like a pile of slang and jargon, but most of it grew from one inherited adjective. The later senses are extensions of little length, little duration, and not enough.
Already English before 1150
The origin of the word short is native inheritance, not a loan from French or Latin. Middle English wrote short and schort. Those spellings continue Old English sceort and scort, in use in the Old English period, before 1150. The early meanings already cover little length, small stature, and brief duration. Dictionaries that track first attestation treat the adjective as Germanic in origin and note a verb of the same age: Old English sceortian, to grow short, to fail, to run out. A transitive use, to make something shorter, is in place by the late twelfth century.
Northern and early Middle English sometimes kept sc- forms such as scort. The Middle English dictionary compares those spellings with Old Norse skort, a related northern word for shortage. The main southern line, though, is West Germanic, passed down inside English rather than imported after the Conquest.
Most sister languages on the Continent later gave up their native adjective of this family and took a Latin replacement. English did not. That fact is the hinge of the history.
From a cut to a Germanic adjective
Comparative reconstruction yields Proto-West Germanic *skurt and, behind it, Proto-Germanic *skurtaz, an adjective meaning short and also lacking or deficient. The usual deeper source is the Indo-European root *(s)ker-, to cut, with the picture of something cut off rather than left whole. Handbooks often mark that step as probable rather than certain. A more technical account, associated with Kroonen, treats the adjective as deverbal, from a Germanic verb of cutting or shortening, and allows a slightly narrower Indo-European ancestor *(s)kerdʰ-. The extra consonant is a specialist dispute. The cut-off sense is the part that explains the English word.
Latin curtus, shortened or incomplete, belongs to the same distant family and later gave English curt. Related forms appear in Sanskrit for something maimed or made small, in Old Church Slavonic and Russian for short, in Lithuanian for being stunted, and in Old Irish for small. Those are cousins. They are not the immediate parents of sceort.
Close Germanic relatives of *skurtaz include Old High German scurz, short, and Old Norse skorta, to be short of, with a noun skort for shortage. German later kept Schurz as a noun for an apron, a garment cut short, while everyday German kurz and Dutch kort come from the Latin adjective, not from the old Germanic one. Icelandic likewise uses a Latin-based form in ordinary speech. English is unusual in keeping the inherited adjective as the normal word.
The same stock named a short garment. Old English scyrte is the source of shirt. Skirt entered Middle English from Old Norse skyrta, a shirt or kirtle. Both names begin as clothes cut short. English short, shirt, and skirt therefore share a Germanic history; curt is the Latin twin that arrived by a different road.
There is no prefix to unpack. The modern word is the Old English adjective with regular sound change: initial sc- before a front vowel became the sh- of short, as in ship and shade.
Length, then judgement, then machines
By late Old English the adjective already described vowels and syllables that were not held long. School grammar still uses that contrast.
From the fourteenth century the word moves into judgement and manner. Memory can be short. A person or a stock can be short of a required amount. Speech can be short in the sense of abrupt. By the 1540s archery supplies a durable image: a shot that falls short does not reach the mark. Around 1590 a short temper is one that does not wait long, as if patience itself had little length. The phrase short and sweet is recorded in the 1530s. To make short work of something, to finish it quickly, appears later in the sixteenth century.
Shortage of quantity is explicit by the late seventeenth century. In the nineteenth, a short drink is a small, undiluted measure, so called because it is served in a small glass. Bakers call pastry short when it is brittle and flaky: fat interrupts gluten and so shortens the dough. That kitchen sense sits beside shortening as a later, related development, not a separate root.
Trade and technology add still more jobs. To sell short, by the mid-nineteenth century, is to sell what the seller does not yet hold. Electrical language of the same century names a short circuit; the clipped verb to short in that sense is early twentieth century. Short story as a label for brief fiction is in print by 1877. Film later used short for a brief subject. Slang around 1897 used short for a streetcar, a shorter ride than a railway journey.
The archery image outlived the sport that coined the phrase. To fall short now means to miss a standard even when no bow is in sight.
The word English kept
German, Dutch, and several other Germanic languages replaced their native adjective with a descendant of Latin curtus. English did not. It still uses short, from Old English sceort, from a Germanic form for what has been cut down to size. Shirt and skirt wear that idea as clothing. Curt is the imported relative. The native adjective never needed to be swapped out.