God has a peculiar origin.
I hope someone got that. While nobody knows for sure where God came from (I need to stop this), it is believed that the word originated from Sanskrit, of all places, with the word huta, meaning "to invoke". This was passed to Proto-Indo-European with ghut, to "call" or "invoke". Then, as PIE faded, a bunch of languages all over Europe picked up the word, with variations such as got, gott, gup, and more. At this point the words all meant "godlike deity" or some other religious item. This was probably passed into English from the Dutch word god. However, at the time the situation was sketchy and some people aren't sure God ever existed (haha) in England until later. There are many possible paths the word could have taken, including the PIE word for "to pour". As God became a sensitive word which some people didn't want to say, euphemisms like golly, gosh, and gee popped up, and a very religious tone took place. Therefore, God has an interesting and unknown origin.
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy philosophy, trivia, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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