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35,981 English word records · 45,491 etymology sections in this online subset
PARTIAL ENGLISH COVERAGE · FULL CORPUS REMAINS LOCAL3 source sections across 2 headwords matching “Pray”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
PrayEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
* As an Irish surname, variant of Prey, from ó Préith, a personal name from Old Irish. * As an English surname, borrowed (via Middle English) from French pré (“meadow”).
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗prayEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *preḱ- Proto-Italic *preks Latin prex Latin precārī Late Latin precāre Old French proiier Anglo-Norman preierbor. Middle English preien English pray Inherited from Middle English preien, borrowed from Anglo-Norman preier, from Old French proiier, from Late Latin precāre, from Latin precārī, from prex (“request, petition, prayer”), from Proto-Italic *preks, from Proto-Indo-European *preḱ- (“to request, ask”). Displaced native Old English gebiddan. Cognate via Indo-European of Old English frignan, fricgan, German fragen, Dutch vragen. Compare deprecate, imprecate, precarious.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗prayEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
Ellipsis of I pray you, I pray thee, whence also prithee.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗INDEPENDENT SOURCE LIBRARY
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openproposedposition text
Are the prayer and gathering senses identical histories?
They converge on Latin collēctus / colligere, but the prayer noun may refer specifically to a congregation’s gathering place; the immediate motivation is qualified as “perhaps.”
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