/əˈbɛt/
[verb] To encourage or help someone to do something wrong or illegal. It is almost always used in negative or legal contexts, as in 'aiding and abetting' a crime.
'Abet' comes from a word meaning to excite a dog with biting — its original meaning was literally about urging hounds to attack.
The word 'abet' reaches us from Old French 'abeter', a compound built from the prefix 'a-' (meaning 'to' or 'at') and 'beter', which meant 'to bait' or 'to hound'. That root 'beter' traces back further to an Old Norse word, 'beita', meaning 'to cause to bite' or 'to hunt with dogs'. So at its very heart, 'abet' was a hunting term — a vivid, physical word about setting dogs upon prey, urging them forward into the chase.
The journey into English happened during the 14th century, when Old French 'abeter' → Middle English 'abetten' made its crossing. At this early stage, the word kept its aggressive, animalistic flavour. To abet someone was to stir them up, to inflame their passion or aggression, much as a hunter might rile his hounds before a chase. The image is not one of quiet assistance but of active, excited goading.
Over time, the word's meaning softened and broadened. It came to mean simply encouraging or supporting another person in an action — but crucially, it retained a shadow of wrongdoing. You rarely abet something admirable. The shift from 'urging dogs to bite' to 'encouraging a person to act badly' is a surprisingly natural one: both carry that sense of pushing another creature toward something dangerous or harmful.
By the 15th and 16th centuries, 'abet' had firmly established itself in English legal language. Courts began using the phrase 'aid and abet' to describe the act of helping or encouraging a criminal to carry out an offence. This legal pairing proved so durable that it survives almost unchanged into modern law today. The two words became almost inseparable, 'aid' covering practical help and 'abet' covering encouragement and instigation.
What makes 'abet' so interesting is how completely it shed its original animal context while keeping its moral charge. Nobody today pictures hunting dogs when they hear the word, yet the feeling of goading, of pushing someone toward something they perhaps shouldn't do, has never left it. It remains one of English's small but potent words — short, sharp, and always carrying a faint scent of guilt.