'Sweat' once meant both sweat and blood in Old English — German 'Schweiss' still holds both senses.
Moisture exuded through the pores of the skin, typically in response to heat, exertion, or anxiety.
From Old English 'swāt' (sweat, blood — the word originally covered both fluids of stress), from Proto-Germanic *swaitą (sweat), from PIE *swoyd- (to sweat, to perspire), built on the root *sweyd- (to sweat). The same root gave Latin 'sūdor' (sweat), Greek 'hidrṓs' (sweat), and Sanskrit 'sveda' (sweat) — a near-perfect phonological match across the branches, confirming the great antiquity of this word. In Old English, 'swāt' could mean 'sweat' or 'blood,' a semantic breadth that suggests the two fluids were linked in the Germanic
In Old English, 'swāt' meant both 'sweat' and 'blood' — the Beowulf poet uses it for blood flowing from wounds. German 'Schweiß' preserves this same double meaning in hunting vocabulary, where it specifically denotes the blood of wounded game. The two liquids that seep from the body under duress