Etymology: < to prep.

Etymology: Old English to- , Middle English to- (te- ) = Old Frisian ti- , te- (to- ), Old Saxon ti- (te- ), Old High German zi- , za- , ze- and zir- , zar- (Middle High German ze- , zer- , zir- , German zer- ) < West Germanic *ti- < Old Germanic *tiz- = Latin dis- , a particle expressing separation, ‘asunder, apart, in pieces’. The West Germanic ti- (= Latin dis- ) in prehistoric times ran together in form with ti the unstressed prepositional form of tó (see to prep.), with which it had no etymological connection (being indeed almost opposite in sense); and when the latter was levelled in vowel with its stressed adverbial form tó , ti- (= dis- ) also followed it, and appears constantly in Old English as to- . In most grammars and dictionaries this is written tó- , like the stressed form of to adv., to prep. But as it was the unstressed form with which the prefix was formally confounded, and as it was itself always stressless (being sometimes written te as in Old Saxon and Old Frisian), it seems more in accordance with the facts to spell it in Old English to- with short o, which is therefore done here. In Old English, about 125 compound verbs in to- are recorded; many of these did not survive in Middle English, where however so many new compounds appear (some formed even on verbs from French) that their number in Early Middle English was not less than in Old English. In the 15th cent. they rapidly disappeared and only a few are found after 1500. Many of the verbs which took the prefix to- had themselves the sense of separation or division; such were break , burst , deal , melt , scatter , strew , tear , etc.; in these to- added little but force to the notion: compare burst , burst asunder , tear , tear asunder , etc. This led to the prefixing of to- to verbs which had no sense of partition, merely as a strengthening or emphasizing particle, as in darken , to-darken , swink , to-swink , etc. From an early time to- verbs were often strengthened by the qualifying adverb all (all adv.) in sense ‘wholly, completely, altogether’; in later times this became universal. Consequently, the prefix began to be viewed as all-to- or allto-; and (verbal prefixes being very commonly written separate from the verb) all to or all-to began to be treated as itself an adverb with the sense ‘altogether, completely’: see all adj., pron., n., adv., and conj. Phrases 14 Thus in the Bible of 1611, Judges ix. 53 ‘and all to brake his scull’ was etymologically and historically all to-brake, i.e. ‘all to-pieces-broke’, but may have been understood as all-to brake, i.e. ‘altogether’ or ‘completely broke’; Fairfax in 1674 by all-to-be-deckt can only have meant all-to bedeckt, ‘completely bedecked’.