/ʃɪt/
[noun] Human or animal waste from the body; also used very informally to mean something of poor quality, or as a strong exclamation of surprise or frustration.
This ancient word is older than Shakespeare, older than Chaucer, and was once completely ordinary — it only became taboo in the 17th century.
The word 'shit' is one of the oldest words in the English language, stretching back to Old English, where it appeared as 'scitan', meaning to defecate. This was a perfectly normal, clinical verb — no more shocking to Anglo-Saxon ears than the word 'urinate' is to modern ones. It descended from Proto-Germanic *skitan, a root shared across the Germanic language family, which connects to Dutch 'schijten', German 'scheißen', and Old Norse 'skíta'. All of these trace back further still to the Proto-Indo-European root *skei-, which carried the idea of cutting or separating — a rather poetic origin for something the body separates from itself.
The noun form developed naturally alongside the verb. In Middle English it appeared as 'schitte' and 'shite', and both the noun and verb were used in everyday medical and agricultural writing without any particular embarrassment. You could find the word in serious texts about animal husbandry or bodily health. The version 'shite' is still the preferred form in Ireland and Scotland today, a small surviving fragment of that older pronunciation.
The shift from ordinary word to taboo term happened gradually during the Early Modern English period, roughly between the 15th and 17th centuries. As English society became more concerned with manners and social refinement — a process historians sometimes call the 'civilising process' — bodily functions moved behind closed doors and their names moved off polite tongues. Latin and French alternatives like 'defecate' (from Latin 'defaecare', meaning to cleanse of dregs) and 'excrement' (from Latin 'excernere', meaning to sift out) became the respectable options. The plain Germanic word was pushed to the margins of acceptable speech.
Despite its taboo status, 'shit' never disappeared. It thrived in informal and working-class speech and eventually exploded into wider use during the 20th century, particularly after the social upheavals of the 1960s loosened many linguistic conventions. By the late 20th century, it had also evolved far beyond its literal meaning. People began using it to mean any worthless thing ('that film was shit'), any situation or collection of things ('pack your shit'), or as an intensifier and filler in conversation ('shit happens'). This kind of meaning expansion is common for taboo words — their emotional charge makes them useful in many different contexts.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about 'shit' is its longevity and stability. In over a thousand years, the spelling changed slightly and the social status changed enormously, but the core meaning barely shifted at all. While languages around it transformed dramatically — Old English becoming Middle English, then Early Modern English, then the language we speak today — this word stayed close to its original form and meaning, a stubborn, earthy constant running through the entire history of English.