Armed conflict has always been a central preoccupation of humans, something reflected in the 20,000 words devoted to the word “war” and its compounds in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The entry starts with the surprising information that originally the Germanic nations had no word that specifically meant “war”. They used instead a word that meant “trouble, discord, strife”, from an Indo-European root meaning “confusion”. This word, werra, was subsequently adopted by the early Romance languages (becoming the modern French guerre).

The continental Germanic languages subsequently developed their own words for war: the German Krieg, for example. Old English went its own way too. Translators of the Latin bellum used gewin, meaning “trouble” or “strife”. The modern “war” did not arrive (from Old French) until the twelfth century.

The word “war”, meaning from the start an armed conflict between states or rulers, established itself quickly, but its spelling (“uuerre”, “weorre”, “worre”, “werre”, “weare”) did not settle down until the seventeenth century.