What the verb does now
To throw something, in ordinary modern English, is to send it through the air with the hands, or with a tool that behaves like a hand. The same verb has taken on a crowd of later jobs: throwing a punch, throwing a person into a cell, throwing a party, throwing a contest on purpose, throwing an error in a program. Those extensions are real, but they sit on top of a much older history. The headword did not begin as a verb of missiles.
Inherited, not borrowed
Throw is native English, not a loan from French or Latin. Old English had þrāwan, a strong verb whose usual work was twisting and turning, including writhing or curling. The recorded past was þreow and the past participle þrawen, sometimes with the prefix ge-. The form is already in writing around the year 1000. Middle English continues it as throwen, thrawen, and related spellings. By the early thirteenth century, forms such as throuen are used of casting an object with force.
That casting sense was not the ordinary Old English way to talk about sending something through the air. The common verb for that job was weorpan, which survives in modern English as warp. Across the Middle English period, throw took over the work of weorpan for hurling, while warp kept and developed the idea of bending something out of true. The two verbs changed places rather than one simply dying out.
The origin of the word throw is therefore a story of rotation first and propulsion later.
A West Germanic turning-verb
Behind the Old English form stands a West Germanic verb reconstructed as *þrāan, from Proto-Germanic *þrēaną, “to twist or turn.” The continental cousins still mean turning rather than hurling, and they line up closely: Dutch draaien, German drehen, Low German draien or dreien, Old High German drāen, Old Saxon thrāian, Old Frisian thrāia. Scots thraw still means to twist or wring. Secure matching verbs are lacking in Old Norse and Gothic, so the family looks West Germanic rather than pan-Germanic.
Further back, handbooks reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European root of the *ter- / *terh₁- type, with a core sense of rubbing and turning and with offshoots that involve twisting, boring, and grinding. English thread and thresh belong to that deep cluster. Latin terere, “to rub or grind,” is a more distant relative, as is Greek teirein in the same rubbing range. The phonetic reconstruction is not identical from dictionary to dictionary. What the sources do agree on is the starting point: friction and rotation, not a primitive meaning “fling.”
Old English kept þrāwan as a Class VII strong verb. That is why the modern paradigm is throw, threw, thrown rather than a regular past in -ed. Most of the continental cousins later became weak verbs. English held onto the old strong pattern.
How the sense moved
The step from twisting to hurling is the least certain part of the history. Historical dictionaries propose an unrecorded middle meaning: to send a missile by a twist of the arm, or with a sling. The idea is plausible, because a throw often is a rotary motion. No dated citation of that intermediate sense survives, though, and the sources treat it as a hypothesis rather than a documented chapter.
The older senses did not vanish. They lived on in northern English and in Scots, and in technical language. Middle English already uses the verb of turning work on a lathe. A potter still throws a vessel by shaping clay as it rotates on the wheel. Silk-throwing is the twisting of filaments into thread. Those trades keep the rotary meaning that everyday speech mostly abandoned.
Once the hurling sense was established, figurative uses multiplied without needing a new root. Around 1300 the verb describes wrestling an opponent to the ground. By the late fourteenth century it can mean to send forth light, or to throw clothes on in a hurry. Late fifteenth-century English uses it of delivering a blow. The sixteenth century has a horse throwing its rider and a person thrown into confinement. As a verb of confusing someone it is nineteenth-century; deliberately throwing a race or a game is American colloquial language from the 1860s. Throwing a party is early twentieth-century college slang. Programming later reused the physical picture: an exception is thrown up the call stack until some handler catches it.
The noun meaning an act of flinging is recorded from the sixteenth century, though stone’s throw as a rough measure of distance is already Middle English. A different noun throw, a stretch of time, goes back to Old English þrāg and is not this verb; its further origin is uncertain.
The cousin that kept the old job
German drehen still means to turn, twist, or rotate — the work English largely left behind. That single cousin is a useful reminder. The flying object is an English development. The older verb was about the turn itself: the arm, the wheel, the twisted thread.