troth

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English trouthe, also trothe,^[2][3] a variant of treuthe,^[2][4][3] inherited from Old English trēowþ (“faithfulness, veracity, truth”),^[5][6][7] from Proto-Germanic *triwwiþō (“contract, promise”),^[1] from Proto-Indo-European *deru- (“to be firm, solid, steadfast”).^[2][5] It is a doublet of truth,^[5][8] with a cognate in Old High German gitriuwida (“loyalty”).^[9] Barnhart and Hoad explain the vowel by a shift of stress from the e to the o of the Old English form, the form with stressed e giving truth;^[7][10] Hoad adds assimilation to trow.^[10] The OED's revised entry instead has the vowel and w combine in early Middle English into a diphthong “ou”, which normally became a long open o in early modern English; orthoepists such as E. Coles (1674) also record a short vowel, which one modern British pronunciation has.^[6] The verb is partly a use of the noun and partly shortened from betroth,^[6] with Middle English trouthen as its form.^[11][8]

Earliest recorded meaning

Faith, trust, confidence, and also belief or a creed: about 1175, in the Ormulum.^[6] Barnhart dates the form trowthe to probably about 1150,^[7] the Random House text to 1125–75,^[4] and Etymonline to the late 12th century.^[5] Hoad dates the sense "plighted word" only to the 15th century,^[10] and Ayto the variant to the 16th,^[12] both later than the OED's Middle English quotations.^[6]

Semantic evolution

In Middle English the word had all the main senses of truth,^[6] whose underlying meaning, in Ayto's account, is "faithful, steadfast", with "in accordance with the facts" a later development.^[12] In the 16th and 17th centuries the abstract idea of matching reality went mostly to the spelling truth, and troth was largely kept for personal acts of constancy such as public declarations of commitment between two people.^[6] Johnson (1755) still glossed it "truth; faith; fidelity".^[13]

Outside regional speech it has been rare since the 16th century except in archaic phrases, compounds and derivatives.^[6] Etymonline names Midland and Northern English dialect as its later home.^[5] Its best-known survival is the marriage vow I plight thee my troth, "I pledge my word".^[14] Wright's dialect dictionary (1898–1905) still records troth for "truth" in Scotland, and exclamations such as faith and troth in Yorkshire and Cornwall and troth and bedad, with Irish forms such as thrath and throth.^[15]

Timeline

• c. 1175 – faith, trust, confidence; belief, a creed (obsolete by 1530).^[6]
• before 1225 – faithfulness, honesty, the quality of being true to a person or cause.^[6]
• c. 1225 – one's faith as pledged in a solemn undertaking, also of betrothal, as in to plight one's troth.^[6]
• c. 1225 – by my troth, as a strong assertion.^[6]
• before 1387 – that which is true, a true statement (obsolete by 1663).^[6]
• c. 1390 – in troth, in fact, truly.^[6]
• before 1400 – verb, to pledge one's troth to someone; to engage to marry.^[6][11]
• before 1616 – adverb and interjection, in truth, truly, in Shakespeare.^[6]

Meanings

Noun

1. (archaic) One's faith or word as pledged in a solemn undertaking, especially a betrothal.^{[9][16][11][2]}
2. (archaic) Loyal faithfulness; fidelity, good faith.^[11][2][9]
3. (archaic) Truth.^[9][16][17]
4. plight one's troth or pledge one's troth: to make a solemn promise, especially of marriage.^[6][17][16]
5. by my troth, in troth: expressions of assertion, truly, indeed.^[6][17][9]

Verb

1. (archaic) To pledge one's word to someone; to betroth.^{[2][11][6][17]}

Interjection

1. (rare) In truth, truly, indeed.^[6][18][15]

Word family

• trothless
• betroth
• betrothal
• trothplight

Related words

• truth
• true
• trow
• truce

References

1. ^ a b c Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
3. ^ a b Kurath, Hans; Kuhn, Sherman M.; Lewis, Robert E., eds. (1952–2001), Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; online edition ed. Frances McSparran et al. (2000–2018)
4. ^ a b Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
5. ^ a b c d e Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
7. ^ a b c Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
8. ^ a b Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
9. ^ a b c d e Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
10. ^ a b c Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
11. ^ a b c d e Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
12. ^ a b Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
13. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
14. ^ Cresswell, Julia (2021), Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
15. ^ a b Wright, Joseph, ed. (1898–1905), The English Dialect Dictionary, 6 vols., Oxford: Henry Frowde; via EDD Online 4.0, University of Innsbruck (CC BY 4.0)
16. ^ a b c Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
17. ^ a b c d Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
18. ^ The Chambers Dictionary (2014), 13th ed., Edinburgh: Chambers