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
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.
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
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
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
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.