/maɪt/
[noun] Great strength or power, especially physical force. It can also describe the power that a country, organisation, or person has to influence or control things.
'Might' and 'may' share the same ancient root — meaning the modal verb grew directly from the noun for raw physical power.
The word 'might' stretches back to the very earliest recorded forms of English, rooted in the Proto-Germanic word *mahtiz, which carried the sense of physical strength and the capacity to act. This form passed into Old English as miht or mæht, where it meant power, ability, and bodily force. Speakers of Old English used it freely to describe the strength of warriors, the power of God, and the capability of any person to accomplish a difficult thing. It sat comfortably alongside words like 'main' and 'mightily', all drawing from the same deep well of meaning.
The Proto-Germanic root *mahtiz itself derives from the even older Proto-Indo-European root *magh-, which expressed the idea of being able or having the power to do something. This ancient root is remarkable for how widely it spread across European languages. In Greek, it became mekhos, meaning a means or device — eventually giving English the word 'machine' via Latin machina and Old French machine. In Old High German, the same root produced maht, and in Gothic it appeared as mahts. Everywhere the word appeared, it carried this core sense of capacity, ability, and controlled force.
In Old English, the distinction between 'might' as a noun and 'might' as a verb was not yet firmly set. The verb form, magan — meaning to be able — gave rise to the past tense meahte or mihte, which became the modern modal verb 'might'. This is the form we use today when we say 'it might rain' or 'she might have known'. So when you use 'might' to express possibility, you are actually using the fossilised past tense of an Old English verb that once simply meant 'to have power'. The modal verb and the noun are, in essence, the same word seen from two different angles.
Through the Middle English period, roughly 1100 to 1500, the spelling settled gradually from miht into might, partly influenced by the common scribal habit of adding a silent gh to represent a guttural sound — similar to the sound in Scottish 'loch' — that was slowly disappearing from spoken English. The word 'night' (from Old English niht) and 'light' (from Old English leoht) went through the same process. By the time English printers standardised spelling in the late 15th and 16th centuries, the gh had become purely visual, a ghost of the old pronunciation.
The phrase 'with all one's might' preserves the noun in its oldest and most physical sense, evoking the image of someone throwing every ounce of bodily strength into an effort. Meanwhile, the well-known saying 'might makes right' — meaning that those with the most power determine what is considered acceptable — has been traced in various forms back at least to ancient Greek philosophy, but entered English prominently in the 19th century. It captures the darker shadow the word has always carried: power is morally neutral, and 'might' has always been just as available to tyrants as to heroes.
What makes 'might' particularly fascinating is its double life. As a noun, it feels old and slightly formal — something from legends and sermons. As a modal verb, it is one of the most ordinary words in daily English, used dozens of times a day to hedge possibilities and soften requests. Yet both uses come from exactly the same source, a single ancient Germanic idea about what it means to be able to do something. Few English words carry such a long and unbroken thread from the earliest campfire stories of northern Europe straight into a modern text message.