How a Frankish term for confusion became English's name for organized violence

But the word has traveled far from its origins. When a medieval scribe first wrote wyrre in the Peterborough Chronicle, the word meant something closer to “confusion” or “strife” than the organized, state-sanctioned violence we now understand.

This essay studies the history of a word, not the glamor of violence. Every date is drawn from scholarly sources. Every reconstructed form is marked with an asterisk. The journey begins in prehistory and ends in the present moment.

The Northern Exception

Standard Old French changed the Germanic /w/ sound to /gw/, which later simplified to /g/. This is why Latin Willelmus became French Guillaume. The Frankish word *werra followed this pattern to become guerre.

But the northern dialects—Norman, Picard, Burgundian—resisted this change. They kept the Germanic /w/ sound intact. When Norman soldiers crossed the Channel in 1066, they brought werre, not guerre. This is why English has “war,” “ward,” “warden,” and “warrant”—all preserving the Norman /w/.

Middle English Variants

The Middle English Dictionary records dozens of spellings: werre, warre, war, weer, weir, weorre, wer, were, werr, and even guer, guerre, gwerre—showing continued contact with Central French forms. The spelling “war” stabilized only with the spread of printing after 1476.

In Proto-Germanic, the verb werran- meant “to bring into confusion.” Old Saxon werran and Old High German werran meant “to confuse.” The noun werra in Old High German meant “confusion, strife.”

By the time the word entered Frankish and was borrowed into Medieval Latin in 858 CE, it had shifted to “strife, quarrel, sedition.” The episcopal letter that first attests it glosses werras as what common people call “strifes or arguments or seditions.”

The further shift to “organized armed conflict between states” appears complete by the Middle English period. The Peterborough Chronicle's first use in 1121 already refers to King Henry I's campaign in Normandy—a royal military expedition, not mere confusion.

The Figurative “War on X”

The 20th century extended “war” metaphorically to non-military campaigns. Attorney General Homer Cummings declared a “War on Crime” in 1933. President Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 State of the Union declared “unconditional war on poverty in America.” Nixon's “War on Drugs” followed in 1971. The construction is now ubiquitous.

Key Observations

The Frankish Spread: The Frankish word *werra became the standard word for “war” in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese—all major Romance languages except Romanian (which uses the Slavic razboi).

Germanic Diversity: Despite being language relatives, English uses war (from Frankish via French), German uses Krieg (from “stubbornness”), and Dutch uses oorlog (from “fate/decree”).

East Asian Unity: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean all use the same characters (戰爭), reflecting historical cultural borrowing of Chinese vocabulary.

The Frankish Form

Frankish is unattested—no texts survive in the language. The form werra is reconstructed from its Romance descendants (French guerre, Spanish/Italian/Portuguese guerra) and the Old High German cognate werra. Some sources reconstruct werru.

Original Meaning

Sources variously gloss Frankish werra as “confusion,” “strife,” “quarrel,” “riot,” or “tumult.” The PIE root suggests “confusion” was primary, but Germanic attestations emphasize “strife/conflict.”

Why Not Latin bellum?

The dominant theory holds that bellum was abandoned because it merged phonologically with bellus (“beautiful”) in Vulgar Latin. Alternative theories suggest bellum described “orderly” Roman warfare while werra captured post-Roman chaos, or that bellum acquired taboo associations.

The word “war” is itself a casualty of war. It arrived in English on the back of the Norman Conquest, part of the vast linguistic transformation that reshaped English after 1066. Native English words for war—guth, wig, hild—were displaced just as Anglo-Saxon nobles were displaced by Norman lords. These Old English words survive only in personal names and ancient poetry.

The original meaning—“confusion”—persists as semantic DNA. War brings confusion. The etymology knew this before modern theory articulated “fog of war.”

And the figurative extension to “war on poverty,” “war on drugs,” “culture wars” shows how the word continues to evolve, its semantic range still expanding a thousand years after it first appeared in English.