The word down, as such a common word (serving as a preposition, adverb, adjective, verb, and noun), may not initially appear to have a fascinating history, but it is actually quite intriguing. There are documented references dating back to the earliest days of Old English, showing various spellings such as doune, duna, downe, and dun. In its earliest forms, it was spelled as adun, but the first unstressed vowel was dropped, possibly due to confusion with the phrase a dun and the word adun. The term adun can be traced back to ofdune, which literally means “off the hill”. The main component, dune (also the origin of the English word “dune”), signifies “hill” and is derived from a Proto-Indo-European word similar to dheue, meaning “closed”. The word of is the root of English words like off and of, and ultimately stems from PIE apo, which means “away”. This particular etymology makes a lot of sense.
