At different times in Middle English, the term legend was spelled legand, legande, legant, legeand, legent, legende, legeant, legiant, and legyand. Despite these variations, they all share the root leg- and a combination of an alveolar nasal and an alveolar stop. This reflects its origin from Latin legenda, meaning “story” (it was borrowed in the early 1300s through the twelfth-century Old French word legende). Legenda was the feminine nominative singular gerundive of the verb for “read”, legere, and meant something like “thing which ought to be read”. This ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction leg, which meant “gather” and also contributed to words like analogy, legal, dyslexia, tautology, logarithm, intelligence, and prologue.
