Zero history or origin on the word
There’s plenty on the origin and history of the word.
“bad” is interesting because, according to the information that’s there (which, I agree, is pretty extensive), it can’t be traced back farther than 13th/14th century English because, “It has no apparent relatives in other languages.” It seems as though it didn’t really come from anywhere, and Late Middle Ages English-speakers apparently invented a word for themselves to describe the opposite of “good”.
Comparable words in the other Indo-European languages tend to have grown from descriptions of specific qualities, such as “ugly,” “defective,” “weak,” “faithless,” “impudent,” “crooked,” “filthy” (such as Greek kakos , probably from the word for “excrement;” Russian plochoj , related to Old Church Slavonic plachu “wavering, timid;” Persian gast , Old Persian gasta- , related to gand “stench;” German schlecht , originally “level, straight, smooth,” whence “simple, ordinary,” then “bad”).
So, I can sympathize if @thetaoofben was perhaps hoping to know the origins of “bad” in terms of which words in other languages that it was derived from, But the problem isn’t that those aren’t documented, it’s that people have looked for them and they never found any! (Which the entry does document.)
1 Like
Agree. It’s peculiar.