English uses stick for a thin piece of wood, for almost anything shaped like one, and for the verbs of piercing and clinging. The spelling is shared because the history is shared. Long before glue and hockey, the word named a slender object that could go in and stay.
Inherited, not borrowed
The origin of the word stick is native Germanic English, not a loan from French or Latin. Old English already had the noun sticca. It meant a twig or slender branch, and it also meant a rod, a peg, and a spoon. Middle English spellings include stikke, stik, and sticke. The noun is recorded before the twelfth century because it is already an Old English word, not a later import.
The verb is equally old. Old English stician meant to pierce, puncture, or stab, and it also meant to remain embedded, stay fixed, or be fastened. That second cluster is not a modern add-on. Speakers already treated going in and staying in as one action. Later English only stretched the staying.
Cognates confirm the path. Old Norse stik is a stick or stake. Old High German stehho and modern German Stecken mean a stick or staff. Dutch stek can be a plant cutting and, more loosely, a place. On the verb side, German stechen still means to stab or prick, with older relatives in Old Saxon and Old Frisian.
A root of sharpness
The Old English pair points back to a Proto-Germanic noun of the type stikkô, a pole or stick, linked to a verb of pricking or fixing. Behind that sits an Indo-European root reconstructed as steig- or (s)teyg-, with the sense to pierce, to prick, or to be pointed. The letters of the reconstruction vary by handbook; the meaning does not.
That layer also ties English stick to words that have nothing to do with timber. Latin instigare, to goad, and Greek stizein, to prick or to tattoo, are standard relatives. Greek stigma, a mark made with a pointed tool, belongs in the same group. English stitch is a Germanic cousin: a puncture that leaves a mark in cloth rather than a rod of wood.
The prehistoric picture is not fully tidy. Some linguists have tried to join this piercing root to a different reconstruction used for sting. A 2005 survey of the Germanic evidence judged that attempt formally awkward and left the relationship unclear. Stick and sting feel close in modern English, but it is not safe to treat them as one ancient word.
If the noun grew from the piercing verb, the earliest stick was likely a pointed one, a twig or peg valued because it could be driven in. That is a reading of the root, not a separate Old English definition. What the Old English glosses actually show is already wider: ordinary thin wood as well as implements.
Shape takes over the noun
A word for a long, thin piece of wood is easy to reuse. By the mid twelfth century it could mean a cudgel or a staff used as a weapon, and also a support for a candle. Late in the fifteenth century it named rolled goods in rod form, cinnamon among them. From the 1670s it was a staff for pushing or striking in a game, first billiards, then later hockey and lacrosse.
The same outline produced workshop and slang senses. Printers assembled type in a composing stick. A conductor's baton was called a stick by 1849. Drivers named the gear lever a stick by 1914. Cigarette is recorded by 1919. Around 1800 a stiff, awkward, or spiritless person could be a stick. Remote rural country became the sticks. A hockey stick, a stick of butter, and a stick of dynamite do not need new etymologies; they are the same slender shape, or the same object put to a new job.
The pairing sticks and stones, attested from the mid twelfth century, first meant the timber and the stone of a building, every part of a structure. Early in the fourteenth century every stick could mean every scrap of material, and so the whole of a thing. The later playground line about words and bones sits on top of that older sense of stuff, not only of weapons.
From the point to the hold
The verb kept stabbing as a core sense and let adhesion grow beside it. By the late thirteenth century it could mean to fasten something in place. Around 1300 it already described something that remains in the mind. The mid fifteenth century added persistence: to keep on with a course of action. Stick out, to project, appears in the 1560s.
Slang later filled in the gaps without a new root. To stick someone, to cheat, is recorded in the nineteenth century. Stick around, to remain, is early twentieth. The common past is stuck, not sticked. A few technical uses take regular sticked because they mean to use a stick as a tool, as when a compositor sets type or a gardener props a plant, rather than to pierce or to cling.
The useful fact to keep is the pointed object itself. English did not first name a harmless bit of kindling and then invent a verb of stabbing. It named the thing from the act of going in, then spent centuries using the same word for whatever stays put once it has gone in.