“Weird” is a weird word
_Macbeth, IV, 1, Macbeth in witches cave_(1829), Johann Heinrich Ramberg
_Weird_ is one of the most commonly used words in the English language. Chances are, the word will pass through your lips (or be tapped out by your fingers) today.
You’ll use it when you need to describe something out of the ordinary: _a weird coincidence_, _a weird smell in the fridge_,or — heavens forfend! —_that weird guy at the office_.
We say _weird_ all the time for the little everyday oddities we encounter.
But _weird_ wasn’t always such a casual word. A thousand years ago, it was one of the heaviest words in the English language: the ancestor of _weird_ was the Old English word _wyrd_, which meant ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’
_Wyrd_ haunts Old English poetry. It shows up in the bleakest and most fateful moments of poems like _The Wanderer_ and _Beowulf_.
The _Beowulf_ poet puts it on the lips of the hero of his poem, who mentions _wyrd_ after detailing his requests for what should happen if he perishes in battle: don’t worry about burying him, send his armour back to his uncle. Then comes _wyrd_, in what sounds like a proverb:
> _Gǣð ā wyrd swa hīo sċel._ > > ‘_Wyrd_ always goes as it must’ (_Beowulf_ 455b)
Or, as the narrator of _The Wanderer_ puts it, in the middle of an account of how he’s forced to sail the sea, utterly alone:
> _Wyrd bið ful ārǣd_. > > ‘_Wyrd_ is totally inexorable.’ (_Wanderer_ 5b)1
_Wyrd_ comes from the same root as the verb _weorþan_, pronounced roughly _WEAR-than_, which meant ‘to happen’ or ‘become’.
So _wyrd_ is ‘that which happens’.
Poets praised above all the man who could face whatever happens — to face _wyrd_ — “without flinching”.2
So how did a word for the inexorable logic of the universe end up describing things as mundane as that rather peculiar smell in your fridge?
The answer is, oddly, a literary one, and one in which destiny itself seems to have taken a hand: but for the choices of two or three people, we might not have had the word _weird_ in English at all.
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The story of _wyrd_’s transformation into _weird_ begins in the later Middle Ages, in the period we call Middle English (AD 1100–1450).
The dividing line between Old English and Middle English is the Norman Conquest of 1066. The Normans, who spoke a form of French, gained political power in England, and for a while, French displaced English as the language of prestige among the higher classes of society.
Eventually, however, even the nobility came to adopt English, but they brought many of their French words with them when they did. As a result, French words started pouring into the English language around AD 1250.
These included words that meant the same thing as _wyrd_, namely, _fortune_ and _destiny_. They were later joined by the Latin word _fate_. Once these new, fancy-sounding French and Latin words had entered the language in the 13th and 14th centuries, the native English _wyrd_ became superfluous.
As a result, _wyrd_ is missing from the Middle English record, at least, in the south of the English-speaking world. It was in the north, particularly Scotland (the really far north!) that _wyrd_ survived. There, in the Scots language, it came to be spelled _weird_ rather than _wyrd_.
These Scots origins are the reason _weird_ is spelled so, well, weirdly. After all, it is one of the classic exceptions to the rule “_i_ before _e_, except after _c_”.
Given its pronunciation, we would expect it to be spelled with _ee_, _ie_, or _ea_, to match how the _ee_-sound is written in _weed, field,_ or _beard_. But it’s not.
_Weird_ is spelled weirdly because it follows the rules of Scots, not English.
Like Old English _wyrd_, the Scots _weird_ meant ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’, as in this quotation from the 14th-century Scots poem _The Brus_:
> _Bot Werd that to the end ay driffis // The varldis thingis_‘But Fate that to the end always drives the world’s affairs’ (_The Brus,_ 4.148–149)
Just as fate was often personified in classical mythology, so too could _weird_ refer to the personified agents of destiny.
The classical idea was of three supernatural sisters — in Greek, they were called the _Moirai_: Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis — who measured out the thread of each person’s destiny, and cut it where fate decreed. The Romans had an equivalent trio called the _Parcae_.
Norse mythology also records the _Nornir_, or Norns, who had a similar function to that of the Moirai and Parcae. Their names were Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld. The name _Urðr_ is simply the Old Norse equivalent of _wyrd_.3
Scots authors used the phrase _weird sisters_ to refer to the Fates of classical mythology:
> _The thre sisteris fatall callit Cloto, Latis & Antropus thre werd sisteris_ > > ‘The three fateful sisters called Cloto, Latis, and Antropus, three weird sisters’ (1515; _The Asloan Manuscript_)4
Later, the term _weird sisters_ was applied to the three women in the story of Macbeth who prophesied his rise to the throne. When Shakespeare tells the story, these are three witches. But Shakespeare isn’t the only one who told this story, nor was he the first to do so.
Shakespeare’s source was a work called _Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland_, published in two editions in the late 16th century.
In Holinshed’s account, Macbeth encounters “three women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world”. After they make their prophecies, Holinshed reports:
> _afterwards the common opinion was, that these women were either the **weird sisters**, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science, bicause euerie thing came to passe as they had spoken._5
Holinshed helpfully glossed the term _weird sisters_ for his English-speaking audience as _goddesses of destinie_. When Shakespeare took this scene into Macbeth, he kept the phrase _weird sisters_ but left out the explanation.
In the _First Folio_ text of _Macbeth_, printed 17 years after the play was first performed, the word is spelled _weyward_ or _weyard_ rather than _weird_, for example:
> _The weyward Sisters, hand in hand_(_Macbeth_ 1.3.30)
The use of _weyward_ for _weird_ is usually thought of as a mistake by one of the compositors — the typesetters who assembled the printed pages — of the First Folio.
_Weird_ was not a common English word at the time, which is why Holinshed defined it for his readers. _Weyward_, on the other hand, standing for _wayward_ ‘having gone astray’, was a much more common word, one often used by Shakespeare.6
The mistaken word _wayward_ is distantly related to _weird_, or at least the -_ward_ portion is. Both -_ward_ and _weird_ come from the same ancient root, one that meant ‘to turn’.7
Just as fate — _weird_ — is the way things ‘turn out’, someone going _homeward_ is ‘turning home’.
The obscurity of _weird_ was what made it so prone to miscopying. Some later folio editions of Shakespeare even changed it to _wizard_!
In modern editions of _Macbeth_, however, the spelling of the phrase has been normalized to _weird sisters_, often spelled _weïrd_ to indicate that the word must be pronounced with two syllables rather than one.
This change was made by Lewis Theobald (1688–1744), the first rigorous textual critic of Shakespeare’s works. He did so based on how _weird_ was used in Holinshed, Shakespeare’s likely source for _Macbeth_.8
Once _weird_ was established in subsequent editions of _Macbeth_, it stuck. In fact, _weird_ has done more than stick. It has downright flourished in the English language since then.
But the same obscurity that had troubled the compositors of the _First Folio_ meant the meaning of _weird_ was a blank slate upon which those hearing it could project whatever they wanted. But many more changes were in store for _weird_.
For many years, the only place most English speakers ever saw the word _weird_ was in the phrase _weird sisters_ or _weird women_ in the play _Macbeth_.
The word _weird_ shows up six times in _Macbeth_, and in no case is it clear from the context alone what it means.9_Weird_ simply named the three women who foretold that Macbeth would become king.
This gave listeners and readers latitude to ascribe to the word _weird_ whatever meaning seemed appropriate given the context.
It wasn’t even clear that _weird_ was originally a noun: the _weird_ of _weird sisters_ could just as easily have been an adjective. If it were an adjective, what could it mean?
The _weird sisters_ were three strange, uncanny, supernatural women telling the future. Perhaps _weird_ simply meant ‘strange’, ‘uncanny’, or ‘supernatural’.
This appears to be what enough people thought to change the meaning of the word. Uses of _weird_ simply meaning ‘eerie’ or ‘supernatural’ — with no connection with the _weird sisters_ of _Macbeth_ — began in the early 19th century with the Romantic writers.10Shelley, for example, was fond of using _weird_ in this way.
> _Some said I was a fiend from my **weird** cave, > > Who had stolen human shape_(_Laon and Cythna_ 9.8; 1817)
> _In lone and silent hours, > > When night makes a **weird** sound of its own stillness._ (_Alastor_ 29–30; 1816)
Almost as soon as _weird_ began circulating outside of _Macbeth_, its meaning broadened too, from ‘eerie’ and ‘uncanny’ to ‘odd’ or ‘unusual’. Dickens, for example, used _weird_ simply to mean ‘odd’:
> _He was a man with a **weird** belief in him that no one could count the stones of Stonehenge twice, and make the same number of them._(_Holly-tree Inn: Guest_ in _Household Words_; 1855)
This broader usage is the one that has exploded in popularity, especially in the second half of the twentieth century.
The _Oxford English Dictionary_ reports the frequency of the adjective _weird_ rising from 2.3/million words in 1960 to 6.1/million words in 2010.
These frequencies are computed from Google Books; when the internet is used instead, we see that _weird_ is even more frequent still: the _OED_’s online corpus, covering 2017–2025, shows the frequency of _weird_ hovering between 15–17/million words.
That makes _weird_ one of the most common words in the English language. Quite the journey from a Scots word so obscure that people misunderstood its meaning on hearing it!
_Weird_ is now a fixture of the contemporary English language, but its destiny hinged on the decisions of individuals: if Holinshed had not written _weird sisters_ into the story of Macbeth, if Shakespeare had not found that story interesting enough to turn into a play, if Theobald had not emended _weyward_ to _weird_, if the Romantic poets hadn’t found the word just perfect for expressing an uncanny mood, we wouldn’t have _weird_ today.
And I’d have had to give this “Weird Word” series an entirely different name.
Scots quotations have been drawn from _A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue_, English quotations from the _Oxford English Dictionary_.
- Barbour, John (1997). _The Bruce_. Ed. A. A. M. Duncan.
- Bek-Pedersen, Karen (2022). ‘Macbeth and the “Weird Sisters” – on Fates and Witches.’ _Scottish Studies_ 39: 58–80.
- Braunmuller, A. R. (ed.) (2008). _Macbeth_ (_The New Cambridge Shakespeare_).
- Craigie, W. A. (ed.) (1925). _The Asloan Manuscript_.
- Dickens, Charles (1855). “The Holly-Tree: The Guest.” _Household Words._
- Fulk, R. D., Robert E. Bjork & John D. Niles (2008). _Klaeber’s Beowulf_. 4e.
- Holinshed, Raphael (1587). _Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland_.
- Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1816). _Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude_.
- Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1817). _Laon and Cythna_.
- _Oxford English Dictionary_: _weird_ n., _weird_ adj., _-ward_ suffix.
The meaning of _ārǣd_ is up for debate; popular translations include ‘inexorable’, ‘relentless’, ‘resolute’, or even ‘wise’.
Fulk et al. (2008): lxxiii.
_Verðandi_ ‘becoming’ is also from the same root as _wyrd_. As for _Skuld_‘debt; obligation’, that’s another article.
_The Asloan Manuscript_. Craigie, ed. (1925): 324–325.
Holinshed (1587), _Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Vol. II:_ _The historie of Scotland_, 170–1.
For much more on the _weyward_ question, see Braunmuller (2008: 255–256). The other spelling in the First Folio, _weyard_, is a reasonable enough spelling for a pronunciation of _weird_ drawn out into two syllables, which is what the metre requires.
This root is Proto-Indo-European *_wert-_, the same root that gave birth to the Latin verb _vertere_ ‘to turn’, which English has in words like _convert, invert, revert, etc._
_Theobald_ is pronounced as if it were spelled _Tibbald._ Not every scholar agrees with Theobald’s change. Bek-Pedersen (2022), for instance, suspects the _weyward_ spelling may have been deliberate.
In the _New Cambridge Macbeth_, _weird_ appears at 1.3.30, 1.5.7, 2.1.20, 3.1.2, 3.4.133, 4.1.134.