Old English, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch stoel, German Stuhl, also to stand. Current senses of the verb date from the late 18th century.

• In Anglo-Saxon times a stool was any kind of seat for one person, and in particular a throne. Among the other types of seat it came to refer to was one enclosing a chamber pot, and so a privy or lavatory. Then the word was transferred to the act of going to the toilet itself, which is how it ended up as a term for faeces. The Groom of the Stool was formerly a high officer of the royal household, in medieval times responsible for the royal commode or privy. To fall between two stools is to fail to take either of two satisfactory alternatives. This comes from the old proverb between two stools one falls to the ground, which was first referred to in English by the medieval writer John Gower around 1390: ‘Thou farest as he between two stools That would sit and goes to ground.’ The first stool pigeon (late 19th century) is often said to have been a pigeon fixed to a stool as a decoy for wildfowl, but in reality it probably had nothing to do with a small chair. It is more likely to come from the old term stale, from Old French estale, applied to a pigeon used to entice a hawk into a net. It came to be applied to a person employed by gamblers or criminals as a decoy, and later (on the other side of the law) to a police informer. See also nark