peine

Forms

peine f (oblique plural peines)^[1]

• paine, painne, poine, poinne, peinne, pene^[1][2][3][4]

The oldest texts have the plural poenas and penas;^[5][6] Chrétien de Troyes writes painne, peinne and poinne.^[2]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin poena (“penalty, punishment”).^[1][7][8][9] Gamillscheg describes its development as semi-learned.^[10] Latin had borrowed the word from Ancient Greek ποινή (poinḗ, “blood-money, penalty”),^[11][1] the price paid by a killer to the kin of the slain.^[12] The DHLF compares words in Avestan and Russian but finds no clear Indo-European family for the Greek word.^[6]

In imperial Latin the word widened from "punishment" to "grief, pain", the sense the Romance languages inherited.^[6][9] Its Romance cognates include Italian pena, Spanish pena and Old Occitan pena, and the Latin word was also borrowed into Welsh poen.^[8]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is the Vie de saint Léger, about 1000 by the DEAF's dating, where the plural poenas names the sufferings inflicted on someone.^[13][14][5] The Passion of Clermont, of about the same date, has penas in the same sense.^[15][5]

Semantic evolution

From the sufferings inflicted on the body the word passed to the trouble one takes for an aim, which the TLFi finds in the Vie de saint Alexis.^[5][6] In Chrétien de Troyes it means punishment, as the death to be chosen for traitors, and torment or distress of body and mind.^[2] Weakened senses, "toil, fatigue, difficulty", appeared early and spread through all the dialects of France, and a peine meant "with difficulty, scarcely".^[9][16] Phrases followed: se mettre en peine de about 1165 and perdre sa peine "to labour in vain" in Chrétien's Yvain.^[5]

Bloch and Wartburg note that the legal sense of punishment was taken again from Latin.^[9] The sense "work, task" is recorded in 1409, and the modern word is French peine.^[5]

Timeline

• c. 1000 – poenas in the Vie de saint Léger.^[13][14][17]
• c. 1000 – penas in the Passion of Clermont.^[15][5]
• c. 1090 – peine, trouble taken for an aim, in the Vie de saint Alexis (about 1050 by the TLFi's dating).^[5][18]
• c. 1100 – peine and pene in the Chanson de Roland.^[4]
• 1113–1119 – in Philippe de Thaon's Comput, the first Anglo-Norman record.^[19][20]
• c. 1165 – se mettre en peine de in Benoît's Roman de Troie.^[5]
• 1176–1181 – perdre sa peine in Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain.^[5]
• 1409 – "work, task".^[5]

Meanings

Noun

1. punishment, penalty; a fine.^[2][20]
2. torment, suffering of body or mind; the pains of hell.^[2][20][16]
3. effort, toil, trouble taken.^[20][16][5]
4. difficulty;^[16][20] a peine, with difficulty, scarcely.^[16][20]

Anglo-Norman

The AND first cites the word from 1113–1119 and records punishment, divine punishment, a monetary penalty, physical pain and torture, the pains of hell and purgatory, mental torment, toil and difficulty.^[20] Its phrases mean "with difficulty", "barely", "without punishment", "effortlessly" and "on pain of".^[20] Etymonline traces the English word pain, first recorded as peine in the late 13th century, to this word.^[21]

Word family

• pener

Descendants

• French peine^[1][5]
• Middle English peine (borrowed; → English pain)^[21]

Usage notes

Tobler–Lommatzsch, Godefroy, the DÉCT and the AND head the word peine.^[3][2][20] The same spelling is also an Anglo-Norman form of peigne "comb", which has a separate source.^[20]

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f Dictionnaire électronique de Chrétien de Troyes (DÉCT), LFA / Université d'Ottawa – ATILF, CNRS / Université de Lorraine (2014), p. s.v. peine
3. ^ a b Tobler, Adolf; Lommatzsch, Erhard (1925–2002), Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch, 11 vols., Berlin / Wiesbaden / Stuttgart: Weidmann / Steiner, p. 7:555
4. ^ a b Stein, Achim; Kunstmann, Pierre; Gleßgen, Martin-D., eds., Nouveau Corpus d'Amsterdam, version 4 (lemmatised corpus of Old French texts, after A. Dees), Universität Stuttgart, github.com/michaniets/NCA (texts by DEAF siglum), p. RolS
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Trésor de la langue française informatisé (2004), ATILF – CNRS & Université de Lorraine, atilf.fr/tlfi; electronic version of Imbs, Paul; Quemada, Bernard, eds. (1971–1994), Trésor de la langue française, Paris: CNRS / Gallimard
6. ^ a b c d Rey, Alain, ed. (1992), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Paris: Le Robert, p. s.v. peine
7. ^ Wartburg, Walther von, et al. (1922–2002), Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 25 vols., Bonn / Leipzig / Basel: Klopp / Teubner / Zbinden, p. 9:114
8. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 6628
9. ^ a b c d Bloch, Oscar; Wartburg, Walther von (1989), Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française, 8th ed., Paris: Presses universitaires de France, p. 512
10. ^ Gamillscheg, Ernst (1966–1969), Etymologisches Wörterbuch der französischen Sprache, 2nd, fully revised ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 730
11. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. s.v. poena
12. ^ Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; Jones, Henry Stuart (1940), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. s.v. ποινή
13. ^ a b Möhren, Frankwalt, Dictionnaire étymologique de l'ancien français (DEAF): Complément bibliographique, electronic version (DEAFBiblEl), Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, alma.hadw-bw.de/deafbibl (texts by siglum, with their dates), p. SLégerA
14. ^ a b Rainsford, Thomas (2025), Old Gallo-Romance Corpus, github (the earliest Gallo-Romance texts, lemmatised; texts by siglum), p. SLégerA
15. ^ a b Rainsford, Thomas, CorMétAF: lemmatised extracts of Old and Middle French verse and prose (990–1500), github (texts by siglum), p. PassionA
16. ^ a b c d e Greimas, Algirdas Julien (1979), Dictionnaire de l'ancien français jusqu'au milieu du XIVe siècle, 2nd ed., Paris: Larousse (printing of 1988), p. s.v. peine
17. ^ UD Old French PROFITEROLE and UD Middle French PROFITEROLE treebanks, Universal Dependencies (from the SRCMF and the Base de français médiéval; texts by DEAF siglum), p. SLégerA
18. ^ Möhren, Frankwalt, Dictionnaire étymologique de l'ancien français (DEAF): Complément bibliographique, electronic version (DEAFBiblEl), Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, alma.hadw-bw.de/deafbibl (texts by siglum, with their dates), p. AlexisS1
19. ^ Baldinger, Kurt; Möhren, Frankwalt; Städtler, Thomas, eds. (1971–2021), Dictionnaire étymologique de l'ancien français (DEAF), Heidelberg: Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften; DEAFél / DEAFpré, deaf-server.adw.uni-heidelberg.de, p. s.v. peine1
20. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND2), Aberystwyth University, anglo-norman.net (2nd ed., 2005–), p. s.v. peine
21. ^ a b Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com