bane.
cause of someone’s (violent) death; bane
Meaning & usage
cause of someone’s (violent) death; bane
Where this word comes from
As a simplex noun a borrowing from Old Swedish bani, from Old Norse bani, from Proto-Germanic *banô, from Proto-Indo-European *gʷʰon-on-, from the o-grade of *gʷʰen- (“to strike, to kill”). Cognate to English bane, Icelandic bani. The word can be regarded as a reborrowing from Old Swedish mediaeval literature. It is not attested in writing in the 16th and 17th centuries, but was reinforced due to its usage in the mediaeval Swedish country laws, which were in use until the 18th century. During the 17th century its usage is usually accompanied by a definition explaining the meaning. It was revived in the late 17th century due to the resurging interest in the middle ages and the Icelandic sagas, cf. other Icelandic loans from the same era, e.g. idrott, skald, dyrd. Already in SAOB (1899) it is regarded as archaic or literary and mostly used in a few set phrases. The word survived in the compound baneman (“slayer, murderer”), which is attested from the 16th and 17th centuries, and dialectally in the southern Swedish word hönsbane (“henbane, Hyoscyamus niger”), in standard Swedish bolmört.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.