The word 'much' is today a quantity word — a determiner, pronoun, and adverb expressing 'a great amount' or 'to a great degree.' But its Old English ancestor 'micel' (also 'mycel') meant something broader and more physical: 'great, large, big' in size, not just quantity. The shrinkage of 'much' from a general adjective of size to a specialized quantity word is one of the more dramatic semantic narrowings in English history.
Old English 'micel' was a common adjective appearing in texts from the earliest period. It could describe a large person, a great battle, or a big hall — any physical or metaphorical largeness. The Lindisfarne Gospels (c. 950 CE) use 'micel' to translate Latin 'magnus.' Place-names preserve the old meaning: 'Mitchell' and 'Mitcham' contain 'micel' in the sense of 'big.' The form
The phonological evolution from 'micel' to 'much' parallels the development of 'such' from 'swylc.' In both cases, a velar consonant (the 'c' in 'micel,' pronounced /k/ or /tʃ/ depending on the following vowel) underwent palatalization and the word was shortened. The Old English 'c' before front vowels was already pronounced as /tʃ/ in some dialects, and the final unstressed syllable was lost, yielding 'much.' This is a regular sound change shared
The Proto-Germanic ancestor *mikilaz is well attested: Gothic 'mikils' (great, large), Old Norse 'mikill' (great), Old Saxon 'mikil,' Old High German 'mihhil.' The Gothic form appears prominently in the Bible translation of Wulfila (4th century CE), where it translates Greek 'mégas.' The Old Norse form survives in the Icelandic word 'mikill' (much, great) to this day.
The PIE root *meǵh₂- (great, large) is one of the most widely attested roots in the family. In Greek, it produced 'mégas' (great, large), the source of the English prefix 'mega-' (megabyte, megastar) and the combining form 'megalo-' (megalomaniac, megalith). In Latin, it produced 'magnus' (great), which gave English 'magnitude,' 'magnify,' 'magnificent,' 'magnate,' 'magnum,' and through derived forms, 'master' (from Latin 'magister,' literally 'the greater one') and 'magistrate.' In Sanskrit, it produced 'mahā-' (great), seen in 'maharaja' (great
The breadth of this root's descendants means that English possesses a remarkable cluster of words all meaning 'great' but arrived by different routes: 'much' through Germanic, 'mega' through Greek, 'magnitude' through Latin, and 'maharaja' through Sanskrit. A speaker who says 'much magnitude' or 'mega much' is, etymologically, saying 'great great' — using the same PIE word twice in two different costumes.
The restriction of 'much' to quantity rather than size happened gradually during the Middle English period. As 'great,' 'large,' and 'big' expanded to cover physical size, 'much' retreated into the domain of uncountable quantity ('much water,' 'much effort') and degree ('much better,' 'much obliged'). By the 16th century, using 'much' to mean 'physically large' was already archaic. The adjective that once described