English wear is the ordinary verb for having clothes, a watch, or a seatbelt on the body. It also names the slow damage that use inflicts on cloth, stone, or patience, and as a noun it covers both garments, often in compounds such as footwear, and the scuffing that shows they have been used. Ask for the origin of the word wear and the first answer is almost too plain: it is a native English verb of dressing, not a loan from French or Latin.
Inherited from Old English
Speakers of Old English already used werian in the sense to clothe, put on, or cover. Middle English kept the verb as weren or werien; the modern spelling wear is a later settlement of that line. The earliest English evidence belongs to the Old English period, before 1150. Sister Germanic verbs include Old Norse verja, Old High German werian, and Gothic wasjan, also found prefixed as gawasjan, all meaning to clothe or to put clothes on someone. Gothic even had a matching opposite, andwasjan, to strip clothes off. The family is West and East Germanic as well as North: this was a common verb of dressing across the early Germanic languages, even though several of those languages later let it fade.
The Germanic ancestor is usually reconstructed as Proto-Germanic *wazjaną, a causative: to make a person clothed rather than merely to be dressed. Dictionaries do not all write the same starred form. Some older etymologies give a slightly different Germanic stem, but they point at the same clothing family rather than at a different root. The morphology matters because it explains why the English verb is transitive in its oldest sense. You wear a cloak; in the older language you could also clothe someone else. The later, intransitive uses (a fabric that will wear; hours that wear on) grew out of that core, not the other way around.
This is inheritance, not borrowing. English did not take wear from Latin vestis or from a Romance verb of dressing. Those words are cousins, as the next section shows.
A root shared with vest
Behind the Germanic verb sits Proto-Indo-European *wes-, to dress or to put clothes on. Latin vestis, a garment, is from that root and later supplied English vest, vestment, and invest through French and Latin. Ancient Greek hénnumi, to put on, Sanskrit vaste, Welsh gwisgo, Albanian vesh, and Hittite waš- belong to the same set. None of those languages is the source of English wear; they are parallel descendants of the dressing root. A speaker who knows vest and wear as near-synonyms in a clothing shop is looking at two arrivals of one prehistoric verb, centuries apart and by different routes.
The Germanic clothing verb had a dangerous neighbor in sound. Old English werian was also the shape of a separate verb meaning to guard, ward off, or protect, from Proto-Germanic *warjaną and a different Indo-European root, *wer-. In most other Germanic languages the clothing verb was pushed aside, and the clash of homonyms is a likely reason. English is unusual in keeping the clothing sense as everyday vocabulary. A dialectal wear meaning to guard or drive something off still appears in parts of Britain; that is the old protect verb, not a later twist of putting on a coat. The two verbs look identical on the page in Old English, which is why it is easy to mix their histories. They are not the same word.
How a weak verb became irregular
Old English werian was weak: its past tense and past participle used a dental ending, so the ordinary past was wered. During the fourteenth century the verb began to copy the pattern of rhyming strong verbs such as bear and tear, and swear followed a similar pull. Past wore and participle worn spread by analogy with those neighbors. Sources agree that the change started in the 1300s. Some historical records suggest the new strong forms remained uncommon until the sixteenth century, when they became the standard conjugation. For a stretch of Middle and early modern English both kinds of past were in use. An obsolete past ware also turns up, matching older pasts of bear.
The direction of the change is the striking part. English more often drags irregular verbs toward a regular -ed past. Wear went the other way. A once-simple weak verb became the familiar irregular set wear, wore, worn. Learners who treat that pattern as primordial are looking at a late medieval fashion, not at the oldest English conjugation.
From putting on clothes to using them up
The damage sense is not a second coinage. By the late thirteenth century, wear could mean to consume or spoil something by repeated use, an easy step from what happens to garments put on every day. A shirt that is worn every morning frays; once that picture is available, stones, tyres, and tempers can fray in the same way. Phrasal uses grow out of that picture. Wear out is recorded by the late fourteenth century, wear away by the mid-fifteenth, wear off by the 1690s, and wear down in the nineteenth. The noun wear appears in the late 1300s as the act of wearing clothes, then from the 1560s as the articles themselves, and later as the loss caused by ordinary use. The pairing wear and tear is attested from the 1660s; worse for wear from 1782.
Time can wear on in the same metaphor: hours pass by slow attrition. Patience can be worn thin. None of that needs a new root. It is the dressing verb applied to anything that thins under friction. The noun compounds of modern English (sportswear, evening wear, children's wear) keep the older, literal sense close to the surface: they name what is put on, not what is worn away.
The shirt and the vest
The useful snapshot is this. The shirt you wear is named with a Germanic verb that English never dropped, even while sister languages let the clothing verb fade beside a homonym meaning to ward off. The vest over that shirt is a Latin relative of the same ancient dressing root, brought in by a later, separate path. English kept both words, and then, by a rhyme with bear and tear, taught a once-regular verb to form wore and worn.