What the word does in English now
In current English, stay most often means to remain in a place, to keep a quality or condition, or to lodge for a while as a guest. The matching noun names that period of remaining: a hotel stay, a hospital stay. The same spelling also covers a legal postponement, a command to halt, a supporting rope on a ship, and the stiffeners once sewn into corsets. Those uses share a sound and a family of ideas about holding still. They did not enter English as a single inheritance.
How the everyday verb arrived
The common verb is a late Middle English borrowing. Written forms such as steien and staien appear around the 1440s. Standard historical dictionaries trace them to the Anglo-French stem estai-, from Old French ester (also found as esteir), a verb meaning to stand or remain. That French verb continues Latin stāre, to stand.
This is a borrowing, not a native Old English survival and not an English prefix-plus-root coinage. Speakers took over a French stem as a whole. English already had a Germanic cousin of the same deep root in stand. Stay is the later Romance relative, brought across after the Conquest rather than inherited from the earliest English.
Latin stāre is a well-travelled donor. Italian stare and Spanish estar both descend from it and still carry senses of remaining, being located, or being in a state. Older handbooks reconstruct the Indo-European root as *sta-; more recent notation writes *steh₂-, with the basic sense of standing, placing, or making firm. Other English words from the Latin side of that family — state, statue, station, status, stance — arrived on their own paths. They sit near stay in the lexicon, but they are not pieces of it.
Where handbooks disagree
Not every account tells the same story. A minority line derives the remain-verb from Old French estayer, to prop or hold up, itself a Germanic loan into French, and treats a direct descent from Latin stāre as historically weak. Walter Skeat once argued that the original English sense was to support, with halt and remain developing from that. The chronology recorded for English is unfriendly to that sequence: detain and come-to-a-halt appear before remain, and the Oxford English Dictionary, along with several desk dictionaries, still prefers ester and Latin stāre as the source of the everyday verb. The disagreement is worth stating; it is not settled by inventing a single tidy pedigree.
Two older stays that never left
English already had a stay that had nothing to do with visiting. Old English stæg named the heavy rope that braces a mast. That noun is native Germanic, from a reconstructed *stagaz, and it has close cousins: Dutch stag, German Stag, Old Norse stag. The same Germanic base is linked with steel and with ideas of firmness. Romance languages later borrowed the nautical term from Germanic, so French étai and Spanish estay are not Latin inheritances. Traffic in this cluster ran both ways across the Channel.
Separately, early fourteenth-century English took from Old French estaie a noun for a wooden prop. The French word is probably Germanic in origin, perhaps Frankish, and it produced a verb estaiier (modern French étayer), to brace. English used that verb by the early fifteenth century for propping and sustaining. From the support-noun come the stays of a corset: strips of whalebone, metal, or plastic that stiffen a garment, and then the garment itself. A mainstay was first a specific mast-rope running from the mainmast; only later did it become any principal support.
These Germanic stays and the Latin-French remain-verb may ultimately share a very deep Indo-European idea of standing firm. That is a reconstructed possibility, not proof that sailors, millwrights, and innkeepers were using one word.
How the meaning moved
The earliest well-dated English verb sense is not today’s don’t leave. In the mid-fifteenth century stay is used transitively to detain or hold back, and intransitively to cease going forward. The halt sense is now mostly archaic, except in set phrases: stay your hand, stay an execution. The legal meaning, to postpone a proceeding, is in place by the 1520s. The matching noun, a stay of proceedings, follows in the 1540s.
Remain as the opposite of depart is recorded in the later sixteenth century, though a late-fourteenth-century surname Steyhame already hints that speakers associated the form with remaining at home. Lodging as a guest is attested from the 1550s. By the 1590s things as well as people can stay in place. The imperative Stay! belongs to the same century. The noun for a stretch of remaining is built on the verb then as well.
Later English kept adding phrases on the remain-and-endure side. American stay put is nineteenth-century. Come to stay, meaning become permanent, appears in the 1850s. Staying power and stay the course both belong to that century; the latter started as racing language about a horse that could hold a pace to the finish. The adjective staid, now meaning sober or settled in manner, began as a past participle of stay, the same way paid relates to pay. That fossil is a useful reminder that halt and remain were once closer than they feel today.
A concrete split worth keeping
The useful fact is not that stay is simply Latin. Everyday remain-stay almost certainly is, via Old French ester and Latin stāre, with living Romance cousins in Italian stare and Spanish estar. The rope on a mast is Old English. The prop, the corset bone, and the verb meaning to brace came through French from Germanic. English folded them into one spelling, which is why a judge can stay a sentence, a visitor can stay the night, and a mast can still need stays.