So here’s the nutshell. Obey literally means “listen to.” Makes sense, right? Because to obey someone is, well, to listen to what they tell you to do. As in, to do it.
Simple. Except, just looking at the word, you probably don’t actually see the root words in there, right? I know I didn’t.
Ob- is a Latin prefix that means “to, toward.” But -ey? Yeah, that’s where I was scratching my head. Until I read that it’s actually from the same audire root that brings us words like auditory and audio. What’s with the complete change in spelling though?
Well, in Latin when they combined the two roots, it became obedire or oboedire…just how that ellision worked. So in French, it became obeir. And when the word traveled from French to English around 1300, Anglicizing it resulted in obeien, which eventually became obey.
Interestingly, the noun form, obedience, actually traces its English uses back another hundred years before the verb form! It’s been in use, from the same roots, since 1200.
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Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. 
