köken: PIE word *ḱóm From Old French contraction, borrowed from Latin contractiōnem, the accusative singular of contractiō (“a drawing together, contraction; abridgement, shortening; dejection, despondency”), from contrahō (“to draw things together, assemble, collect, gather; to enter into a contract”) + -tiō (suffix forming nouns relating to actions or their results); contrahō is derived from con-…
köken: From Old Dutch *wē, from Proto-West Germanic *wai, from Proto-Germanic *wai. Compare Old English wā (English woe), Old High German wē (German weh), Old Norse vei.
Variant of weh, which see. The usual distinction between the two forms was first noted by Adelung. While the Deutsches Wörterbuch (1955) considered this distinction “untenable”, it is in fact a linguistic reality, albeit with occasional exceptions.