The word 'wrong' is a Viking-era borrowing from Old Norse that completely displaced its native Old English equivalent, leaving almost no trace of the word it replaced. Before the Norse settlement of England, the Anglo-Saxon word for 'wrong' or 'crooked' was 'woh' — a word that has vanished so thoroughly from English that even historical linguists rarely encounter it outside Old English texts. The Norse replacement was so total that modern English speakers have no awareness that 'wrong' is not an originally English word.
Old Norse 'rangr' meant 'crooked, awry, twisted,' with a natural metaphorical extension to 'unjust, wrong.' The physical sense came first: something 'rangr' was literally bent or distorted, and from this came the moral sense of deviation from what is straight and proper. This metaphorical leap from 'crooked' to 'immoral' is one of the most common in human language — English 'crooked,' Latin 'pravus' (depraved, literally 'crooked'), and Greek 'skolios' (from which 'scoliosis,' literally 'crookedness') all follow the same path.
The word descended from Proto-Germanic *wrangaz, meaning 'twisted,' from the PIE root *wrenǵ-, meaning 'to turn' or 'to twist.' This root was remarkably productive in Germanic languages and produced a cluster of English words all connected by the idea of twisting: 'wring' (to twist with force), 'wrangle' (originally to twist or struggle), 'wrench' (to twist violently), and 'wrist' (the body part that twists). The semantic thread running through all these words is physical torsion — the action of twisting something from its natural alignment.
The initial 'wr-' spelling in 'wrong' is itself a subject of phonological interest. In Old Norse, the form was 'rangr' without a /w/; the 'wr-' cluster appears to have been restored in English under the influence of the related verb form and cognates like 'wring.' In Middle English, the 'wr-' was fully pronounced, so 'wrong' sounded something like 'wrawng.' The /w/ before /r/ was gradually dropped from pronunciation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leaving only the spelling as evidence — the same process that silenced the 'w' in 'write,' 'wrist,' and 'wreck.'
The displacement of Old English 'woh' by Norse 'wrong' is remarkable because abstract moral vocabulary is typically among the most resistant to borrowing. Languages readily borrow nouns for new objects and technologies, but words for fundamental moral concepts — right, wrong, good, bad — are usually deeply entrenched. The fact that 'wrong' was replaced suggests an extraordinarily deep level of Norse-English bilingual contact in the Danelaw, where speakers were so intimately intermingled that even core moral vocabulary could shift.
The word entered English legal terminology early. 'Wrong' as a noun meaning 'an unjust act' or 'a legal injury' appeared in Middle English and became a fundamental term in common law. A 'wrong' in legal usage is any violation of a right, and 'wrongful' describes actions that are legally impermissible. 'Wrongdoing' appeared in the fourteenth century. The phrase 'in the wrong' — meaning culpable or at fault — dates from the fifteenth century.
Modern English uses 'wrong' across an enormous semantic range: factual incorrectness ('the wrong answer'), moral transgression ('it is wrong to steal'), physical malfunction ('something is wrong with the engine'), unsuitability ('the wrong tool for the job'), and direction ('the wrong way'). All of these senses ultimately trace back to the Norse metaphor of crookedness — the idea that what is wrong is what has been twisted away from the straight, the true, and the proper.