One's familiar acquaintances and neighbours — the circle of people known to a person, from Old English cȳþþ (knowledge, acquaintance), from cūþ (known), the past participle of cunnan (to know/be able).
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Old Englishbefore 900 CEwell-attested
OldEnglish cȳþþ (also cȳþþu) meant 'knowledge, acquaintance, kinfolk, one's native country, homeland' — essentially 'that which is known to you.' Theword derived from cūþ, meaning 'known' or 'familiar', which was the past participle of cunnan ('to know, to be able'), the ancestor of modern 'can' and the dialectal/Scottish 'ken'. The connection to 'uncouth' is direct: un- + cūþ = 'unknown, unfamiliar, strange' — what began as 'not known' evolved into 'lacking
jānāti. Grimm's Law is visible: PIE voiced velar *ǵ shifted to Germanic *k, explaining why Latin gnoscere and English know both trace to *ǵneh₃- but look different. The word kith originally captured the full relational landscape of the familiar: your acquaintances, your countrymen, your homeland. In 'kith and kin,' kith (those you know) is deliberately distinguished from kin (those you are blood-related to), drawing a line between social bond and biological bond. Outside this formula, kith has effectively vanished from living English, surviving as a linguistic fossil. Key roots: *ǵneh₃- (Proto-Indo-European: "to know — root of know, can, ken, cunning, gnosis, noble, cognition"), *kunnaną (Proto-Germanic: "to know, to be able — ancestor of can, ken, cunning, kith, uncouth").