Late Middle English: from Latin paganus 'villager, rustic', from pagus 'country district'. Latin paganus also meant 'civilian', becoming, in Christian Latin, 'heathen' (i.e. one not enrolled in the army of Christ).

• In Latin paganus originally meant ‘of the country, rustic’, and also ‘civilian, non-military’. Around the 4th century ad, it developed the sense ‘non-Christian, heathen’. One theory is that belief in the ancient gods lingered on in the rural villages after Christianity had been generally accepted in the towns and cities of the Roman Empire; another focuses on the ‘civilian’ sense, and points out that early Christians called themselves ‘soldiers of Christ’, making non-Christians into ‘civilians’. A third view compares heathens to people outside the civilized world of towns and cities, belonging to the countryside. Curiously, it was not uncommon to find Pagan as a given name, a custom that has recently been revived. The Latin root paganus came from pagus ‘country district’, which is also the source of peasant. Heathen is similar in meaning and development, coming from a word meaning ‘inhabiting open country’ which is related to heath. Both these words are Germanic and were already in use in Old English.