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/ˌnɒtwɪðˈstændɪŋ/
[adverb] In spite of something; even though something exists or is true. It is used to show that a fact or problem does not change the final result or decision.
'Notwithstanding' is actually three words squashed together — a miniature sentence hiding inside a single word.
Every now and then, English does something wonderfully strange: it takes a whole grammatical phrase and compresses it into a single word. 'Notwithstanding' is one of the finest examples of this. Broken apart, it is simply 'not' + 'with' + 'standing' — literally meaning 'not standing with', or 'not opposing successfully'. The word is a kind of fossilised clause, a tiny complete thought that hardened into a single unit over centuries of use.
The journey begins in Old English, where the verb 'withstand' already existed — from Old English 'wiðstandan', built from 'wið' (meaning 'against') and 'standan' (meaning 'to stand'). This same Germanic root 'standan' is the ancestor of modern 'stand', and its relatives spread across the Germanic language family: Old Norse 'standa', Old High German 'stantan', and Gothic 'standan' all share the same ancient Proto-Germanic source, '*standan'. Further back still, this connects to the Proto-Indo-European root '*steh₂-', meaning 'to stand' or 'to be firm', which also gave Latin 'stare' (to stand) → Italian 'stare' → and influenced English words like 'stable', 'state', and 'station' through Latin.
The compound form 'notwithstanding' began appearing in English during the late 14th century, first as a participial phrase — something like 'the difficulty not withstanding' — meaning 'with the difficulty not successfully opposing'. Legal and official documents of the period loved this construction because it was precise and formal. It allowed a writer to acknowledge an obstacle and then dismiss it in the same breath. Over time, the three separate elements fused together so completely that speakers stopped feeling the individual words inside it.
By the 15th century, 'notwithstanding' had established itself firmly as a preposition and conjunction in formal English, appearing in religious texts, royal proclamations, and legal charters. The King James Bible of 1611 uses it confidently, which helped cement its place in the language. It could now lead a clause ('Notwithstanding the rain, they marched on') or close one ('They marched on, notwithstanding'), giving it a flexibility that made it especially useful to writers who needed to build complex, layered sentences.
What is most surprising about 'notwithstanding' is how it captures a fundamentally human habit of thought — the act of conceding a point before overriding it. We acknowledge reality, but we push through it anyway. The word is a small monument to perseverance, built into the grammar of the language itself. Today it has a formal, even slightly old-fashioned flavour, heard most often in legal documents, contracts, and careful official writing — but that formality is precisely its strength, carrying with it centuries of precision and weight.