The Etymology of Joust
Joust reached Middle English around 1300 from Old French joster, to fight or engage in close combat — particularly the formal mounted contest of arms that came to define late medieval chivalric ritual. The Old French verb derives from a Vulgar Latin *iuxtare, to come close, draw alongside, from Latin iuxta, next to, beside (the same root that gives English juxtapose and adjust). The original sense, then, is just a "drawing-close" — an entirely neutral idea that French specialised into the lethal precision of two armoured knights closing at speed across a tilt. By Chaucer’s time English jousten was firmly the word for tournament combat with lance and warhorse, distinct from the more general melee. The metaphorical sense — to spar verbally or rhetorically — appears from the seventeenth century. The spelling joust replaced earlier just under renewed French influence in the eighteenth century.