/stɑːrt/
[verb] To begin doing something, or to make something begin. It can also mean to move suddenly because of surprise or fear.
'Start' originally meant to jump or leap in fright — beginning something came much, much later.
The word 'start' reaches back into the heart of Old English, where the verb 'styrtan' meant to leap up suddenly, to jump, or to rush. This was a word of physical shock and sudden movement — not of beginnings at all. If a rabbit burst from a bush and startled a hunter, or a horse reared back at a loud noise, that sudden, violent flinch was what 'styrtan' described. It carried all the electricity of an unexpected jolt, with no connection whatsoever to the idea of setting something in motion deliberately.
The Old English 'styrtan' is closely related to Old High German 'sturzen', meaning to hurl or plunge, and to Middle Dutch 'storten', meaning to fall or rush. These words all belong to the same Germanic family, and together they point to a Proto-Germanic root that carried the sense of tumbling or springing suddenly. The Norse languages contributed similarly energetic cousins, reinforcing the idea that early Germanic speakers used this family of words to describe rapid, often uncontrolled bodily movement.
Through the Middle English period, roughly the 12th to 15th centuries, the word 'sterten' kept its core meaning of a sudden physical leap or flinch. You could 'stert' out of sleep, or 'stert' aside in alarm. Crucially, hunting language adopted the word in a very specific way: to 'start' a deer or a hare meant to cause the animal to spring suddenly from its hiding place — to flush it out. This hunting usage is a vital bridge, because it introduced the idea of something being set into motion from a fixed, still position.
It is from this hunting sense that the meaning gradually widened. If you could 'start' a frightened animal from cover — sending it running from a resting point — then by natural extension you could 'start' any process or journey from its resting point. By the 16th century, writers were using 'start' to mean the act of setting out on a journey, and from there the leap to 'to begin anything at all' was short. Shakespeare used 'start' in this transitional way, blending the old sense of a sudden movement with the newer sense of an origin or commencement.
What is especially striking is that two completely opposite ideas — the involuntary flinch of fear and the deliberate act of beginning — ended up sharing the same word. Today, if you 'start' a new job, you are using a word that once described a terrified rabbit bolting from a hedge. And when you 'start' at a loud noise in a quiet room, you are using the word in its oldest, most original sense — a direct, unbroken line back to the Old English speakers who first gave the word its nervous, leaping energy.