834: naught, aught, wight, and naughty Mar 21, 2017

Every now and then there will be a word, especially a compound, which has an extremely obvious etymology, such as 'nothing' deriving from the combination of 'no' and 'thing'. The word, 'naught' is less obvious both visually and in terms of its pronunciation, but not too dissimilarly it comes from the Old English 'nāwiht', which—broken down—would be 'nā' (‘no’) and 'wiht' meaning ‘thing’. The words were more or less interchangeable, but 'wiht' tended to mean ‘creature’ and led to the Modern English word, 'wight' meaning 'man' or sometimes 'animal'. Even so, the word, 'naughty' does in fact derive from 'naught' but did not relate to animalism or aught such as that. Instead, the original sense of the word meant, 'having nothing' though this quickly led to the meaning of the word as 'wicked' which is the current sense. Influences from 'wiht' don't end there; the word, 'aught' meaning 'anything' comes from this, but instead of 'nā' in the compound it uses 'aye' which meant 'always'. Somewhat confusingly, both 'aught' and 'naught' are used to mean the number: zero. Also, this word 'wight' is not related to the Isle of Wight, which comes from the Latin 'Vectis' of Celtic origin meaning, "place of the division".

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