/spɪt/
[verb] To force liquid, especially saliva, out of your mouth; also used to describe rain falling very lightly, or to say something in an angry and sharp way.
The word 'spit' is so old it predates the Norman Conquest, yet its relatives secretly cooked meat across medieval Europe.
The word 'spit' actually carries two entirely separate histories that have lived side by side in English for over a thousand years, and most people never notice the difference. The first 'spit' — the act of expelling saliva from the mouth — descends from Old English 'spittan', a Germanic verb shared by many of the languages that grew up along the North Sea coast. Its cousins include Middle Low German 'spitzen' and Old Norse 'spýta', and behind all of them lies a Proto-Germanic root reconstructed as '*spitjaną', which itself echoes the much older Proto-Indo-European root '*sp(y)eu-', meaning to spit or to spew. The sound is almost onomatopoeic — sharp, short, percussive — as if the word itself is doing what it describes.
The second 'spit' — the long metal rod used to skewer and roast meat over a fire — is an entirely different word wearing the same clothes. This one comes from Old English 'spitu', a noun referring to a pointed spike or skewer. It shares ancestry with Old High German 'spiz' and Middle Dutch 'spit', all tracing back to Proto-Germanic '*spitaz', meaning a sharp point. The connection to sharpness is logical: a roasting spit is simply a long, pointed thing thrust through the meat. This same 'sharp point' idea also gave us the geographical use of 'spit' — a narrow tongue of land or sand jutting out into water — which English sailors and mapmakers were using by the early sixteenth century.
The 'saliva' sense of the verb 'spit' appears confidently in Old English texts from before the eleventh century, making it one of the older bodily-function words in the language. It survived the Norman Conquest largely unchanged, since the French-speaking rulers of England had little reason to import a new word for such a common human act. By Middle English, the word was well established in everyday speech and writing, appearing in medical texts, religious writings, and the occasional contemptuous insult — demonstrating that its social register has always been flexible, capable of meaning anything from a symptom of illness to a gesture of deep disrespect.
What makes 'spit' particularly interesting is how it expanded its meaning over time through metaphor and observation. By the sixteenth century, 'spitting' could describe rain so light it barely qualified as weather — the sky, in English imagination, was doing what a person does when they can't quite commit to a proper action. The phrase 'spitting image', meaning an exact likeness, appeared later and is itself a curious corruption of the older phrase 'spit and image', which may have come from the idea that a perfect copy of something is as close as if it were spat directly from the original — flesh of flesh, feature of feature.
The roasting-spit noun, meanwhile, led its own quiet life in the kitchens and cookhouses of medieval England. It gave rise to the word 'spitfire' — originally a contemptuous term for a person who breathed furious insults like a dragon breathing flame — which later became a term of admiration when the famous British fighter aircraft adopted the name during the Second World War. The same root also quietly feeds the word 'spite', though that word arrived through a different route: Old French 'despit' → Middle English 'spit' or 'spite', meaning contempt or ill will. So while the cooking spit and the spitting mouth are etymologically separate, they have spent centuries close enough together to influence each other's metaphorical lives in surprising ways.