The word “deal” has mesmerised us for months, and that doesn’t seem likely to change. Where did it come from and what does it imply?

A “deal” is an agreement, obviously enough. That’s what it meant in the title of Donald Trump’s 1987 book, The Art of the Deal. Over here, the word had a particular pop-cultural moment with the game show Deal or No Deal?, hosted by Noel Edmonds from 2005 until 2016. After the Brexit referendum in 2016, journalists and headline writers were irresistibly drawn to that phrase.

The Oxford English Dictionary treats “deal” as two different nouns: the first meaning “a portion”, the second meaning “the act of dealing or distributing”. That first noun is said to come from an Old English noun, dael. Such “deals” come in all sorts of shapes and sizes: good deals, great deals, bad deals and deals pure and simple. “I have a deal to look after,” complained Samuel Johnson in a letter of 1777. “Big deal” is from the 1930s; used sarcastically, it is from J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951.