Origins
The word 'still' is one of English's most versatile monosyllables, carrying an adjective sense (still water), an adverb of time (still waiting), an adverb of concession (still, I wonder), a noun (the still of the night), and a verb (to still one's fears). All of these descend from a single Old English word whose core meaning was physical motionlessness — a concept that proved endlessly extensible through metaphor.
Old English 'stille' meant 'motionless,' 'calm,' or 'quiet.' It derived from Proto-Germanic *stiljaz, meaning 'fixed' or 'standing,' which in turn traces to the Proto-Indo-European root *stel-, meaning 'to put,' 'to stand,' or 'to be firm.' This root was productive across the Indo-European languages: it may be related to Greek 'stéllein' (to set, to prepare) and Latin 'locus' (place, from an earlier *stlocus). Within Germanic, the cognates are remarkably consistent: German 'still,' Dutch 'stil,' Danish 'stille,' and Swedish 'stilla' all mean 'quiet' or 'motionless.'
The adjective was the original use, and it remains the most concrete. 'Still water,' 'sit still,' 'a still evening' — these all preserve the Old English sense of physical calm. The verb 'to still' (to calm, to quiet) developed naturally from the adjective in Old English itself.
Middle English
The temporal adverb — 'she is still here,' 'do you still believe that?' — emerged in Middle English through a metaphorical extension that is both elegant and logical. If something is physically still, it has not moved; if something is temporally 'still,' it has not changed. The bridge is the concept of persistence through non-motion. Something that is still present is something that has remained fixed in its state, like an object that has not budged from its position. This metaphor — motionlessness as temporal continuity — is so natural that speakers rarely notice it, yet it represents a genuine conceptual leap from the spatial to the temporal domain.
The concessive sense — 'he lost, but still, he tried his best' — developed from the temporal sense by a further extension. If something is 'still' true despite opposing pressures, it has persisted against resistance. 'Still' in this use implies a kind of stubborn motionlessness in the face of forces that should have produced change. This concessive meaning is well established by the sixteenth century.
A separate word spelled 'still' — the noun for a distillation apparatus — has a completely different etymology. It is a clipped form of 'distill,' which comes from Latin 'dēstillāre' (to drip down), from 'dē-' (down) + 'stillāre' (to drip), from 'stilla' (a drop). The Latin 'stilla' and the Germanic 'still' are unrelated despite their surface resemblance. This is a case of accidental homonymy: two words from different language families that converged in English spelling and pronunciation through independent sound changes.
Later History
The phrase 'still life' — the artistic genre of painted arrangements of objects — comes from the Dutch 'stilleven' (literally 'still life' or 'motionless model'), a term coined by Dutch painters in the seventeenth century. The English term is a direct calque (loan translation) of the Dutch original, preserving the adjective sense of 'motionless.'
In contemporary English, 'still' as a temporal adverb is among the most common words in both speech and writing. Its frequency reflects a fundamental human preoccupation with persistence and change — we constantly need to mark whether states of affairs have continued or ceased, and 'still' is the primary English tool for doing so. What began as a simple physical description — not moving — has become one of the language's most essential markers of temporal and logical relationships.