Origins
The verb 'mean' — in its sense of 'to intend' or 'to signify' — is one of three entirely unrelated English words that share the same spelling, a remarkable convergence that makes 'mean' one of the most polysemous entries in any English dictionary. The verb's own etymology connects it to the deepest roots of human cognition: the PIE root for thinking itself.
Old English 'mǣnan' was a weak verb (Class I) meaning 'to mean, to intend, to signify, to tell of, to declare, to complain about, to lament.' The 'complain' and 'lament' senses, now obsolete in standard English, survive in the related word 'moan' (from Old English 'mǣnan' in its 'complain' sense, with a nasal vowel that developed into the modern diphthong). To 'moan' was originally to 'mean' in the sense of giving voice to one's mind — expressing what one has in mind, particularly grief or complaint.
The Proto-Germanic ancestor *mainijaną meant 'to have in mind, to think, to opine, to intend.' The cognates confirm this: German 'meinen' (to think, to mean, to opine — 'Ich meine, dass...' means 'I think that...'), Dutch 'menen' (to think, to mean), Swedish 'mena' (to mean, to intend), and Old Norse 'meina' (to mean, to hurt — an interesting semantic split). The German usage is particularly illuminating: 'meinen' in German straddles 'to mean' and 'to think/opine' in a way that reveals the original unity of the two concepts. To mean something is to think it; to think something is to mean it.
Proto-Indo-European Roots
The PIE root *men- (to think) is one of the most prolific roots in the Indo-European family. Its derivatives include Latin 'mens' (mind — source of 'mental,' 'mentality,' 'demented'), Latin 'meminī' (I remember), Latin 'monēre' (to warn, to remind — source of 'monitor,' 'monument,' 'admonish,' 'premonition'), Greek 'menos' (spirit, force, mind), Greek 'mania' (madness — literally an excess of mind), Sanskrit 'manas' (mind — the 'manas' of Hindu philosophy), and Old English 'gemynd' (memory, mind — Modern English 'mind'). The word 'mean' is thus a direct sibling of 'mind,' 'mental,' 'mania,' 'memory,' 'monitor,' and 'monument' — all children of the same thought-root.
The three unrelated English words 'mean' deserve careful distinction. The verb 'mean' (to intend, to signify) descends from Old English 'mǣnan,' from PIE *men- (to think), as described above. The adjective 'mean' (unkind, base, average in quality) descends from Old English 'gemǣne' (common, shared, general), from Proto-Germanic *gamainiz, from PIE *moi-n- (exchange), the same root that produced Latin 'commūnis' (common, shared — source of 'common,' 'community,' 'communicate'). The development from 'common' to 'base' to 'unkind' followed a path of social snobbery: what was common was considered low, and what was low was considered contemptible. The mathematical noun 'mean' (average) entered English from Old French 'meien' (middle), from Latin 'mediānus' (of the middle), from 'medius' (middle), from PIE *medʰyo- (middle). Three PIE roots — *men- (think), *moi-n- (exchange), *medʰyo- (middle) — converged on a single English spelling through completely independent pathways.
The semantic range of the verb 'mean' in modern English is complex. 'What do you mean?' asks about intention. 'What does this word mean?' asks about signification. 'I mean to go' expresses intention. 'He means well' attributes good intentions. 'It means a lot to me' expresses significance or value. Each use involves a slightly different relationship between mind, language, and world, but all trace back to the core concept of having something in mind.
Later History
The phrase 'meaning of life' — perhaps the grandest use of the word — treats existence itself as something that might 'mean' in the way a word means: having an intended significance, a purpose placed in it by some intending mind. The question 'What is the meaning of life?' is, etymologically, 'What does life have in mind?' — a question that only makes sense if one assumes a mind behind existence, a thinker behind the thought.
The adjective 'meaningful' and its antonym 'meaningless' map the presence or absence of this intentional content onto experience. A meaningful conversation is one that has substance in mind; a meaningless gesture is one with nothing behind it. The existentialist use of 'meaningless' — life as devoid of inherent meaning — represents the most extreme possible application of the word: an existence in which no mind means anything at all.
The participial adjective 'well-meaning' (having good intentions) reveals an important aspect of the word's semantics: 'mean' in the sense of 'intend' carries an implicit evaluation. We speak of what someone 'means by' an action, treating behavior as a language of intentions that can be interpreted correctly or incorrectly. 'I didn't mean it' — one of the most common phrases of apology — claims a gap between action and intention, asserting that the mind behind the act did not have in mind what the act appeared to signify.
Legacy
The noun 'meaning' oscillates between subjective intention (speaker meaning) and objective signification (word meaning), a distinction that lies at the heart of the philosophy of language. The philosopher Paul Grice's influential theory of meaning (1957) distinguished between 'natural meaning' (those spots mean measles — a causal sign) and 'non-natural meaning' (those words mean war — an intentional act of communication), arguing that the intentional sense is primary. Grice's analysis, whether he knew it or not, aligns with the word's etymology: 'meaning' is fundamentally about what a mind has in mind.