Origins
The word 'wound' is one of the oldest and most stable terms in the English language, descending from Old English 'wund,' from Proto-Germanic *wundō, from PIE *wen- (to strike, to wound). It has cognates in every major Germanic language — German 'Wunde,' Dutch 'wond,' Old Norse 'und,' Gothic 'wunds' (as an adjective meaning 'wounded') — and has maintained its core meaning of 'bodily injury' with virtually no semantic drift for over a millennium.
The PIE root *wen- (to strike, to wound) places the word's origin in the language of violence — a wound is etymologically the result of a blow. This distinguishes it from words like 'injury' (from Latin 'iniūria,' originally a legal term meaning 'injustice, wrong') and 'hurt' (from Old French 'hurter,' to knock against, probably of Germanic origin). Each of these near-synonyms entered English from a different conceptual angle: the wound from the perspective of physical damage, the injury from the perspective of legal wrong, the hurt from the perspective of impact.
The pronunciation of 'wound' (/wuːnd/) is phonologically irregular. Old English 'wund' had a short 'u' vowel, and by the regular sound changes that produced modern English, it should rhyme with 'fund,' 'bund,' or 'stunt.' The long vowel /uː/ is unexpected and has been variously explained. The most common theory attributes it to analogical influence from the past tense of the verb 'to wind' — 'wound' (/waʊnd/). The identical spelling of the two words may have pulled the pronunciation of the injury-word toward a longer vowel. This creates one of English's many homograph puzzles: 'wound' (an injury, /wuːnd/) and 'wound' (past tense of 'wind,' /waʊnd/) are spelled the same but are completely unrelated.
Old English Period
In Old English poetry, 'wund' appears frequently in battle descriptions — the Beowulf poet and the authors of 'The Battle of Maldon' and 'The Wanderer' use the word and its compounds ('wundor-dēaþ,' wound-death; 'heoro-wund,' sword-wound) to catalog the specific damages of combat. The Old English adjective 'wund' (wounded) could be used predicatively: 'he wæs wund' (he was wounded).
The metaphorical extension of 'wound' from physical injury to emotional injury is ancient — it appears in Old English and has parallels in most Indo-European languages. 'Wounded pride,' 'a deep wound to the spirit,' 'time heals all wounds' — these figurative uses treat emotional damage as if it were a cut or blow to the body, a conceptual metaphor so deeply embedded in English that it hardly registers as metaphor at all.
The compound 'wound' plus various body parts or instruments produced a rich Old English vocabulary: 'wundela' (a bandage), 'wundsealfe' (wound-salve). Modern English has 'wound care,' 'wound healing,' and the medical compound 'wound dehiscence' (the reopening of a surgically closed wound). The adjective 'wounded' functions as both a past participle and a standalone adjective ('the wounded soldiers,' 'Wounded Knee'). The psychological term 'wounded healer' — a therapist whose own suffering enables empathy — was coined by Carl Jung, drawing on the mythological figure of Chiron, the centaur who could heal others but not himself.