What speakers do with it now
In present-day English, show is the everyday verb for making something visible to someone else. A person can show a photograph, show a visitor to a seat, show that a claim follows from the evidence, or worry that a stain will show. The matching noun covers staged entertainment, a radio or television programme, a public exhibition, a competitive display of animals, and a pretence: kindness that is only a show. None of those senses is the oldest. For a long stretch of its life in English, the word belonged to the person who looked, not to the person who put an object in view.
The origin of the word show is therefore not a tale of borrowing from French or Latin in the later Middle Ages. It is the story of a native Germanic verb of looking that, in English alone among its close relatives, took on a causative job and then kept it.
How it arrived in English
The verb is inherited. Old English had scēawian, a weak verb whose ordinary work was to look at, gaze, observe, inspect, examine, and sometimes to look for or to choose. Middle English carried the form forward as schewen, sheuen, showen, and other spellings of the same stem. Standard dictionaries that give a first-use date place the English verb before the twelfth century, which is another way of saying it is already present in the Old English record rather than imported later.
West Germanic cousins stay closer to that older looking sense. Dutch schouwen still means to inspect or view. German schauen is still to look or behold. Old Saxon skauwon and Old Frisian skawia were verbs of looking as well. Scots shaw is a near neighbour. English is the language that moved the same inheritance onto the other side of the act of seeing: not I look, but I cause you to look.
The older stem
Old English scēawian rests on Proto-West Germanic *skauwōn and, behind that, Proto-Germanic *skawwōną (handbooks differ slightly in how they write the reconstruction). The Germanic root is *skau-, with a sense of beholding or looking at. Further back, etymologists reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European root often given as *keu- or *(s)kewh₁-, covering seeing, observing, and taking notice. At the Germanic level the makeup is simple: a stem of looking plus the weak-verb ending that Old English realised as -ian. There is no prefix to peel off, and no folk story in which show is a clipped form of some longer Latin word.
That deep root also explains a family of English words that no longer feel like synonyms. Sheen belongs here. Old English scīene meant beautiful or bright, and it sits with German schön and Dutch schoon: what is conspicuous, worth looking at, fair to the eye. Latin cavēre, to be on one’s guard, gives English caution and caveat; the shared idea is watchfulness, not display. Greek kudos, glory of the kind that is seen and spoken of, and Sanskrit kavi, a seer or poet, are often listed as more distant relatives. Those wider links are reconstructed. Sources do not agree on how tightly to bind every item in the set, and it is better to treat them as a plausible family than as a proven paper trail.
When looking became letting others look
The main change is semantic, and the sources do not tell one tidy story about when it began. Surveys of the verb often date the causative reading—let be seen, put in sight, make known—to around 1200, and they say the reason is unknown. On that account the newer use, within about a century, crowded out the older look-at meaning. German never made the same move: schauen stayed with the viewer.
Not every modern dictionary draws the line so sharply. Some already gloss Old English scēawian as looking and displaying. Brief Oxford-style notes stay with look at and inspect. The fairest summary is that the Old English core was the observer’s act; that a cause-to-be-seen reading is firmly in place by early Middle English; and that scholars differ on how far that reading had already gone before the Conquest. What is not in dispute is the result. By later Middle English, speakers were using the verb much as we still do: to make something visible, known, or plain to someone else.
Two further developments from about 1300 still feel modern. The verb can mean explain or make clear, as when a proof shows how a conclusion follows. It can also be intransitive: something shows when it appears or becomes visible. The noun is taken from the verb and is recorded around 1300 in forms such as sceu and schewe, for the act of exhibiting to view. An elaborately prepared spectacle is attested by the 1560s. False appearance, a display meant to deceive, is on record from the 1520s. Ostentatious display follows in the early eighteenth century. Radio programmes are called shows by the 1930s, then television. American horse racing later used show for finishing third, by the early twentieth century, perhaps from an older card-playing use of revealing a hand.
Spelling keeps a trace of an older sound. Shew was common in the eighteenth century and lingered into the early nineteenth; it reflected a pronunciation that rhymed with view, now gone from standard English. The past participle shown was uncommon before the nineteenth century and is now the usual form, though showed survives as a variant, especially in American English outside the passive.
What the German verb still does
If one fact is worth keeping, it is the German one. Schauen still means to look. English show once meant that too, then became the verb that makes another person look, and the older sense dropped away. The word did not travel in from abroad; it changed jobs at home. That is why a show can be a play, a broadcast, an exhibition, or a pretence, while its closest Germanic relatives remain verbs of watching.