Etymology: Early Middle English dē, dee, plural dēs, dees, < Old French de (nominative singular and oblique plural 12–14th cent. dez), modern French dé, plural dés = Provençal dat, datz, Catalan dau, Spanish dado, Italian dado; in form < Latin datum, substantive use of datus, datum ‘given’, past participle of dare to give. It is inferred that, in late popular Latin, datum was taken in the sense ‘that which is given or decreed (sc. by lot or fortune)’, and was so applied to the dice by which this was determined. Latinized mediæval forms < Italian and French were dadus, decius. In late Old French the form dey occurs in 14th cent.; and dez was sometimes used in singular down to 17th cent.: compare the 14–17th cent. English use of dice as singular. The remarkable point in the history of the English word is the change of dē, dēs, to dȳ, dȳs, (dyse, dyce, dice), in the Middle English period. The oldest Chaucer manuscripts, Harl., Ellesm., Hengwrt, have dees, which also survived as late as 1484 in Caxton, but dys occurs in the other Chaucer manuscripts, and in rhyme in the Bodleian MS. of Kyng Alisaunder, part of which is in the Auchinleck MS., attributed to the middle of the 14th cent. Before 1500, dȳ, dȳs seem to have completely passed from the ē into the ī class, the fortunes of which they have since shared. As in pence, the plural s retains its original breath sound, probably because these words were not felt as ordinary plurals, but as collective words; compare the original plural truce, where the collective sense has now passed into a singular. This pronunciation is indicated in later spelling by -ce: compare the umlaut plurals lice, mice, the inflectional forms hence, once, twice, since, and the words ice, nice, advice, device, defence, in all which -ce represents a phonetic and original -s. In the newer senses where the plural is not collective, a form /daɪz/ of the ordinary type has arisen; compare the non-collective later plural pennies.

Etymology: < die v.¹

Etymology: Early Middle English dēȝen , dēghen , corresponding to Old Norse deyja (originally døyja , Old Swedish and Old Danish döia , Danish döe , Swedish dö ), Old Frisian deia , deja , Old Saxon dóian , Old High German touwan , Middle High German töuwen ; these represent an Old Germanic strong verb of the 6th class *daw-j-an , past tense dôw , past participle dawan- , the strong inflections being retained in Old Norse (dó- < *dów , dáinn < *dawans ). In the other languages and in English a regular weak verb. No instance of the word is known in Old English literature (its sense being expressed by steorfan , sweltan , or the periphrastic wesan déad , past tense wæs déad : see dead adj. 1d) hence it is generally held to have been early lost in Old English (as in Gothic, and as subsequently in all the continental West Germanic languages), and re-adopted in late Old English or early Middle English from Norse; but some think that the facts point rather to the preservation of an Old English díegan, dégan, in some dialect; the word appears to have been in general use from the 12th cent., even in the s.w. dialects (see Napier in Hist. Holy Rood, E.E.T.S., 1894). The Middle English dēȝen, dēghen came regularly down to 1500 as deye, which was retained in the North as dey, dē, dee (still current from Lancashire to Scotland); but in standard English dēghe was in 14th cent. (in conformity with the common phonetic history of Old English eh, eah, eoh, as in dye, eye, fly, high, lie, nigh, thigh, etc.) narrowed to diȝe, dighe, whence the later dye, die.The oldest text of Cursor Mundi (Cotton) has only dey ; in the later texts this is frequently altered to dighe , dye , when not in rhyme, in the late Trinity MS. sometimes even in rhyme, with change of text. Chaucer used both dey and dye , the Canterbury Tales (Ellesm. MS.) contains in the rhymes 22 examples of deye and 50 of dye . Both forms are also used in the Wyclifite version, and both occur in Caxton's works. The stem dau- appears also in Gothic in the participial adjective dauþs , Old English déad ( < daud-oz ) dead adj., and the noun dauþus , Old English déaþ , death n.; also in afdôjan ( < afdôwjan), past participle afdauid- ( < afdôwid-) vexed, worried. (The relationship of Gothic diwanô, undiwanei, etc. is uncertain.) The simple verb has shown a notable tendency to die out, and leave its place to be taken by derivatives: thus in Gothic dauþnan to die.