/wɪð/
[preposition] Used to show that people or things are together, or that someone is using something to do an action. For example, 'She walked with her friend' or 'He cut the paper with scissors.'
'With' originally meant 'against' in Old English — the complete opposite of how we use it today.
Few words in English are as quietly extraordinary as 'with.' It appears in almost every sentence we speak or write, yet its origins reveal a meaning almost entirely opposite to the one we know. In Old English, 'with' — spelled 'wið' — primarily meant 'against' or 'in opposition to.' When Anglo-Saxon warriors fought, they fought 'wið' their enemies. When someone argued, they argued 'wið' another person. The idea was one of facing, of being turned toward something in a confrontational stance.
The word descends from the Proto-Germanic root 'wiþra,' meaning 'against' or 'opposite.' This same root produced the Old Norse 'við,' the Old High German 'widar,' and the Gothic 'wiþra,' all carrying that same adversarial flavour. You can still hear this ancient meaning in the English words 'withstand' — to stand against something — and 'withhold,' meaning to hold something back from someone. These compound words are fossils, preserving the original sense of opposition that 'with' itself has long since abandoned.
The great shift in meaning happened gradually during the Middle English period, roughly between the 11th and 14th centuries, as Old English transformed under the enormous influence of Old Norse and Norman French. Old Norse, brought by Viking settlers, used its equivalent 'við' to mean both 'against' and 'alongside,' and it was this second, softer meaning that slowly pushed English 'with' in a new direction. The idea of being turned toward someone, face to face, began to feel more like companionship than confrontation. Two people facing each other were, after all, also together.
By the time Geoffrey Chaucer was writing in the late 14th century, 'with' had largely completed its transformation. It had shed its aggressive edge and settled into the role we recognise today: expressing accompaniment, means, and manner. 'He rode with his companions' no longer suggested a battle but a journey shared. This kind of semantic reversal — where a word ends up meaning nearly the opposite of what it once did — is rare enough to be remarkable, and 'with' is one of the most dramatic examples in the English language.
What makes 'with' even more interesting is how it compares to its relatives in other Germanic languages. German kept both meanings alive in separate words: 'mit' for 'with' in the companionable sense, and 'wider' for 'against,' a direct descendant of that old Proto-Germanic 'wiþra.' English, by contrast, let the old meaning quietly retire into compound words and took the warmer sense forward. Today, 'with' is one of the ten most frequently used words in the English language — a tiny word doing enormous work, carrying centuries of hidden contradiction inside its four letters.