Latin 'versus' (a turning) — began as a plow's turn at the furrow's end, became a line of poetry.
A line of metrical writing; a stanza of a poem or hymn; poetry or metrical composition in general; a numbered subdivision of a chapter in the Bible.
From Latin 'versus,' meaning 'a line of writing, a line of verse, a furrow,' literally 'a turning,' from the past participle of 'vertere' (to turn). The original image was agricultural: a 'versus' was a turn of the plow at the end of a furrow. When writing shifted from boustrophedon (alternating direction) to left-to-right, a 'versus' became the turn at the end of one line before beginning the next. The word entered Old English directly from Latin, alongside the Christianization of England. Key
The word 'verse' originally meant 'a turn of the plow.' In ancient Rome, a 'versus' was the furrow a farmer plowed before turning the oxen around to plow the next row. The word was transferred to writing because early scripts (like boustrophedon Greek) alternated direction at the end of each line — just like a plow turning at the field's edge. A line of verse is, at its origin, a furrow.