/liːv/
[verb] To go away from a place or person, or to let something stay in a particular place or condition. It can also mean to allow someone to do something, or to stop doing something.
The word 'leave' secretly carries two completely different Old English words that fused together over centuries into one.
The word 'leave' as we use it today is actually the result of two separate Old English words colliding and merging over many centuries, which is one of the more remarkable accidents in the history of the English language. The first is the Old English verb *lǣfan*, meaning 'to allow to remain' or 'to let stay behind.' This came from the Proto-Germanic root *laibijan*, which itself descended from the Proto-Indo-European root *leip-*, meaning 'to stick' or 'to remain.' The idea was of something that clings or stays fixed in place while everything else moves on.
The second Old English source is *læfan*, closely related to *lāf*, meaning 'remnant' or 'what is left over.' You can still feel this ancient sense in the phrase 'left over,' which we use for food remaining after a meal. This same root gave Old Norse the word *leif*, which survives today in the Scandinavian name Leif — literally meaning 'heir' or 'descendant,' one who is left behind to carry on. The root travelled into Old High German as *leiban* and into Gothic as *laibjan*, showing how widely this idea of remaining spread across the Germanic world.
The other major branch of 'leave' — meaning 'to depart' or 'to go away from' — grew from the same Old English *lǣfan* but took on an almost opposite meaning through a fascinating shift in perspective. Instead of focusing on what stays behind, speakers began focusing on the person who moves away. Saying 'I leave the house' originally meant 'I cause the house to remain without me,' but over time the emphasis flipped entirely to the act of departing. This kind of perspective shift is common in language history and shows how a single word can quietly rotate its meaning around a fixed event.
The noun sense of 'leave,' meaning permission or a period of time off from work, comes from a completely different Old English word: *lēaf*, meaning 'permission' or 'approval.' This descended from Proto-Germanic *laubō*, which is related to the Old English word *lēof*, meaning 'dear' or 'pleasing.' The idea was that permission was something given with goodwill — to grant leave was to show favour. This root also gave us the modern word 'believe,' through Old English *belēfan*, where *be-* intensified *lēaf*, meaning roughly 'to hold something as pleasing or true.'
By the Middle English period, roughly the 12th to 15th centuries, all these strands had woven themselves into a single word spelled variously as *leven*, *leve*, or *leeve*, covering departure, permission, and abandonment. Chaucer used 'leave' in all its main modern senses, which shows how settled the word had become by his time. The richness of the word today — the way it can mean both going away and granting permission — is a direct echo of its double ancestry, two old roots that grew so close together they became inseparable.
What makes 'leave' especially interesting is how many idioms it has produced. 'Take leave of one's senses,' 'leave well enough alone,' 'leave someone in the lurch,' and 'on leave' all preserve slightly different historical layers of the word's meaning. Each phrase is like a small fossil, holding in place an older sense of the word that daily conversation has otherwise worn away.