Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2011/December

Etymology looks dubious. Merely states: "astony + -ish". The New Oxford American Dictionary reads: ORIGIN early 16th cent. (as astonished, in the sense ‘stunned, bewildered, dismayed’): from obsolete astone ‘stun, stupefy,’ from Old French estoner, based on Latin ex- ‘out’ + tonare ‘to thunder.’ ---> Tooironic 04:45, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

The etymology is obscure. The immediate derivation was from "astony" (as used in the King James bible of 1611), but this seems to have been a variant of astone, from Old French estone-r , estuner , estouner (now étonner). The "astony" variant was used by Wycliffe ("Þes wordis astonyeden hem.", 1375) and Chaucer ("This soden cas this man astonyed so", 1386), but Tyndale used another variant "astunnyed" in his 1526 bible. We could certainly improve our entry, since clicking the link to astony doesn't help with the etymology. Would you like to make the improvement? Dbfirs 12:28, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

The Middle English astonen does a good job. Though I've heard that the Old French estoner is actually from the same Germanic source as Modern English stun, as opposed to from Latin. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:46, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Gets worse, stun says that astonish is unrelated, while astonen says it might be related. Sigh. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:53, 27 December 2011 (UTC)