Quiver: English already had a word for… | etymologist.ai
quiver
/ˈkwɪvər/·noun·c. 1290–1300 CE, Middle English 'quivere', attested in early romances and the Cursor Mundi·Established
Origin
From Frankish *koker through Old French quivre into Middle English around 1300, the arrow-case word took a roundabout Franco-Germanic route while its Old English cousin cocur quietly faded — meaning English ended up borrowing back, via French, a word its own Germanic ancestors already had.
The English word 'quiver' (a case for arrows) derives from Old French 'quivre' or 'cuivre', a borrowing from a Frankish Germanic source. The most acceptedetymologytraces the word through Old French back to Proto-Germanic *kokar- or *kukur-, meaning 'arrow-case'. This root is attested in Old High German 'kohhar' (arrow-case), Old Saxon 'cocar', and Old English 'cocur' — the last of which is the native Anglo-Saxon word for the same object, though it did not survive
Did you know?
English already had a word for the arrow-case — the Old English 'cocur', from the same Germanic root — before the Normans arrived. After 1066, the Frenchversion (quivre, ultimately from Frankish) crowded it out almost entirely. So English didn't borrow a foreign concept; it discarded its own native word and replaced it with a French-coated version of the same Germanic original. The modern German
. The Old French form entered Middle English around 1290–1300, appearing in texts such as the Cursor Mundi. The word has remained semantically stable — it has always denoted a portable case for carrying arrows. The verb 'quiver' (to tremble) is entirely unrelated, from a different Old English root. Cognates include Dutch 'koker', German 'Köcher', and Old Norse 'kogr'. Key roots: *kokar- (Proto-Germanic: "arrow-case, tubular container for arrows"), *geu- (speculative) (Proto-Indo-European: "to bend, curve — proposed but uncertain connection to the quiver's tubular shape").