'Sin' may trace to PIE *es-ont- (being, truth) — Greek used the archery term 'hamartia' (missing the mark).
An immoral act considered to be a transgression against divine law; an offense against a moral or ethical principle.
From Old English 'synn' (sin, moral transgression, offense, crime), from Proto-Germanic *sundjō (sin, true, guilty), possibly from PIE *h₁es-ont- (being, the one who is), from *h₁es- (to be). If this etymology is correct, 'sin' originally meant something like 'it is' — an acknowledgment that the transgression is real, that the guilty party truly did it. The word may thus contain
In archery, the Greek word 'hamartía' (ἁμαρτία) — used in the New Testament for 'sin' — literally means 'missing the mark.' The theological concept of sin was expressed through an archery metaphor: to sin is to aim at the good and miss. This is also the word Aristotle used in his Poetics for a tragic hero's fatal flaw — 'hamartia.'