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Etymlogy

Mural of War (1896), by Gari Melchers

The English word war derives from the lateOld English (circa.1050) words wyrre andwerre, from Old French werre (also guerre as in modern French), in turn from the Frankish*werra, ultimately deriving from the Proto-Germanic *werzō ‘mixture, confusion’. The word is related to the Old Saxon werran, Old High German werran, and the Germanverwirren, meaning “to confuse”, “to perplex”, and “to bring into confusion”.[12] In German, the equivalent is Krieg (from Proto-Germanic *krīganą ‘to strive, be stubborn’); the Spanish,Portuguese, and Italian term for “war” isguerra, derived like the Old French term from the Germanic word.[13] Etymologic legend has it that the Romanic peoples adopted a foreign, Germanic word for “war”, to avoid using the Latin bellum, because, when sounded, it tended to merge with the sound of the word bello (“beautiful”).[ci