Equip is one of English's best-disguised Germanic words. It sounds French, looks French, and arrived from French — but its deepest root is Old Norse. Viking sailors used skipa (from skip, 'ship') to mean arranging or manning a vessel. When Norsemen settled in Normandy, their maritime vocabulary blended with the local Romance language. Old French absorbed skipa as esquiper, meaning 'to fit out a ship,' and over time the word lost any visible connection to its Norse origin. By the time English borrowed French équiper in the 1520s, it had already begun expanding beyond ships to mean outfitting anyone for a task. Within a century, soldiers were equipped, travellers were equipped, and the nautical origin was forgotten. The word's journey — from Norse longships to French harbours to English generality — mirrors the broader pattern of Viking vocabulary hiding in plain sight throughout the language.