/rɪˈwɔːrd/
[noun] Something given to a person in return for good behaviour, hard work, or a helpful action. It can also mean the feeling of satisfaction you get from doing something well.
'Reward' and 'regard' are secret twins — both grew from the same Old French root meaning simply 'to look at'.
The story of 'reward' begins not with gold or prizes, but with eyes. Its earliest ancestor is the Old French verb 'regarder', meaning 'to look at' or 'to look back upon', which itself was built from the prefix 're-' (again, back) combined with 'garder', meaning 'to guard' or 'to watch'. That Proto-Germanic root 'wardaz', meaning a watcher or guardian, was also the ancestor of the English word 'ward'. When the Normans brought their language to England after 1066, they brought this whole family of watching words with them.
The particular Old French form that became 'reward' was 'rewarder', a variant of 'regarder'. In Old French, the sounds 'g' and 'w' existed in friendly competition — northern dialects of Old French often replaced the soft 'g' with a harder 'w' sound, which is why English ended up with two separate words from essentially the same source: 'regard' from the southern French form, and 'reward' from the northern one. It is a remarkable linguistic fork in the road, producing two cousins that look quite different but share the same grandparent.
When 'reward' arrived in Middle English in the early 14th century, it carried a meaning close to 'consideration' or 'heed' — as in paying attention to something, looking back on it with care. To reward someone was, at first, to regard them with special notice. But language tends to drift toward the concrete, and over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries the word shifted from the act of noticing to the physical token of that notice — the gift, the payment, the prize given as proof that someone's efforts had been seen and valued.
This shift from 'looking' to 'giving' is not as strange as it first appears. In medieval society, to be truly seen by a lord or a king was itself a form of gift. A royal glance of favour could mean land, titles, or protection. The act of recognition and the act of compensation were deeply linked — to be noticed was to be rewarded, and so the word smoothly slid from one meaning into the other without anyone feeling the transition.
By the time of early Modern English, in the 15th and 16th centuries, 'reward' had fully settled into its modern sense of a gift or payment given in return for service, good behaviour, or information. Shakespeare used it freely in this sense. The older meaning of 'regard' or 'consideration' was quietly forgotten, leaving behind a word that seems to have always been about prizes and payment — concealing its surprisingly visual, watchful origins beneath centuries of coin and praise.