What the word does now
In present-day English the verb names a desire that may sit just out of reach. Speakers wish they had left earlier, wish a guest a safe journey, or wish an illness on nobody. The noun covers the feeling, the thing hoped for, and the spoken formula that treats wanting as if it could alter events. Formal prose still prefers wish where casual speech would use want: anyone who wishes to stay may do so. None of this overlay came in from French or Latin. The history is native Germanic, and most of what looks odd about the modern shape is sound change, not a new meaning invented from nowhere.
Inherited, not borrowed
English did not import the verb. Old English already had wȳscan, a weak verb used for intense longing and for cherishing a desire, whether the object could be obtained or not. Surviving prose and verse show it taking a genitive for the thing desired and also directing a desire toward a person, for health as well as for harm. Middle English kept the same verb under spellings such as wishen, wisshen, and wischen. From there the modern form is a short run of ordinary changes: the old long y unrounded, and the palatalized sc cluster became the familiar sh.
Sister languages still advertise the family. German wünschen, Dutch wensen, West Frisian winskje, Danish ønske, Swedish önska, and Icelandic æskja and óska all continue the same Proto-Germanic verb, reconstructed as wunskijaną. Scots wis is the northern cousin inside Britain. The English path is inheritance from Old English, not a later loan. The verb is on record before the Norman Conquest.
The English noun is later. Historical dictionaries place it in the early fourteenth century; Oxford’s first citation is from 1390, in John Gower. That noun is formed inside English by conversion from the verb: the act of yearning, and also what one yearns for. Other Germanic languages already had matching nouns of their own — Old Norse ósk, Middle Dutch wonsc, Dutch wens, Old High German wunsc, German Wunsch — so naming a wish is old in the family. English simply rebuilt the noun from its own verb rather than carrying a separate Old English noun all the way through. Old English did have a related noun wusc, but the modern English noun is the converted verb, not a straight continuation of that form.
Why English does not look like Wunsch
The Proto-Germanic stem was wunsk-, with a short u. The verb was built with the suffix janą, which triggered i-mutation in West Germanic: the u was fronted, giving Old English y. That is why English has a front vowel while German Wunsch still shows a rounded one, later umlauted to ü in the verb wünschen. The same suffix palatalized the sk cluster in English, yielding sh. The morphology is genuine, not a folk story: a stem wunskaz, a wish, plus a verb-forming suffix.
Behind Germanic sits a reconstructed Indo-European root, usually written wenh₁- or wen-, with a sense of desiring, loving, or striving for. Handbooks do not agree on the exact laryngeal shape. Some write wenh₁-, others wenH-, and a few argue for an initial laryngeal as well. That disagreement is real and should not be sanded into a single tidy ancestor. What is stable is the set of relatives. Latin Venus and the verb venerari belong here. Sanskrit vanati covers desiring, loving, and winning. Inside English the same root is widely reconstructed for win, wean, winsome, and wont, and, more loosely, for wonder. Those are cousins sitting on a shared older verb of wanting, not offshoots of the English word itself.
From longing to politeness and magic
The core has moved less than the grammar around it. Old English already used the verb for strong yearning and for sending a desire at another person. Later English specialized several constructions. Wish plus a that-clause became the usual way to mark a contrary-to-fact or unlikely situation. Wish plus to plus an infinitive became a courteous stand-in for want, a use that still sounds stiff in casual talk. Wishing someone well, or wishing harm onto an enemy, keeps the old sense of directing a desire toward a person. A once ordinary sense, to recommend or introduce someone, has almost vanished; early modern writers still have it, and contemporary speech almost never does.
The noun picked up a supernatural coloring the old verb did not require. Making a wish, being granted three wishes, and the wishing well — attested by 1819 for an enchanted water hole — treat the word as a speech act with supposed power. Everyday compounds are later still. Wish fulfillment entered English around 1901 as a rendering of Freud’s German wunscherfüllung. Wish-book, for a mail-order catalogue, is on record by 1927. Wish-list is attested by 1972. Those labels hang new cultural jobs on an old Germanic stem; they are not new etymologies.
The latecomer worth remembering
If one dating is worth keeping, it is this: the origin of the word wish is not a medieval borrowing. It is a native Germanic verb whose English noun is a later conversion, first recorded in the 1300s. The sh and the short i are the visible scars of i-mutation and palatalization. German Wunsch is not a source; it is a sibling that never took those English sound changes. Venus, win, and wünschen sit on the same deep root of wanting.