Etymology: Common Germanic and Aryan: Old English feoh, fioh, féo, strong neuter, corresponding to Old Frisian fia, Old Saxon fehu cattle, property (Dutch vee cattle), Old High German fihu, fehu cattle, property, money (Middle High German vihe, vehe, and modern German vieh has only the sense cattle), Old Norse fé cattle, property, money (Danish fæ cattle, beast, Swedish fä beast), Gothic faihu property, money < Old Germanic *fehu < Old Aryan *péku-, whence also Sanskrit paçu (masculine), Latin pecū neuter cattle (compare Latin pecūnia money).

Etymology: < Anglo-Norman fee, fie = Old French fé , fié , *fiet (apparently implied in fiez plural), fief , fieu , fiu , Provençal feo , feu , fieu , Italian fio (probably from French or Provençal; the Langobardic Latin faderfium is a compound of Germanic fehu fee n.¹), medieval Latin feodum, feudum (first cited by Du Cange from a charter of Charles the Fat, a.d. 884), also fevum, feum, fedium, in Sicily fegum. The mutual relation of the various Romanic and medieval Latin forms is somewhat obscure. According to some scholars, fief is a verbal noun < fiever to grant in fee, < fieu , which, as well as the other forms of the noun, descends < feodum or its Germanic source. The ultimate etymology is uncertain. A prevalent view is that the word is < Old High German fehu cattle, property, money (= fee n.¹), + ôd wealth, property. This must be rejected, because such an etymology could directly yield no other sense than that of ‘movable property’, which is very remote from the sense of feodum as used in early records, viz. usufruct granted in requital of service (often opposed to alodis, originally meaning ‘inheritance’); compare the synonyms, German lehen, Old English lǽn (the same word as English loan), and Latin beneficium, i.e. something granted to a subject by the kindness of his lord. A more tenable theory is that the Old French fiu is an adoption of the Germanic fehu in the contextual sense of ‘wages, payment for service’; the Romance word certainly had this meaning (see branch II below), and it is conceivable that the feudal sense is a specific application of it. The d of the Latin forms, feudum, feodum, however, is left unexplained by this hypothesis; some regard it as a euphonic insertion (comparing Italian chiodo nail from vulgar Latin *clo-um < clavum); others think that it is due to the analogy of allodium; and others suppose feudum to be a verbal noun < feudare = feum dare; but each of these views involves serious difficulties. It is not impossible that two originally distinct words may have been confused. A conjecture proposed by Prof. Kern, and approved by some German jurists, is that feodum represents an Old High German *fehôd, related to the verb fehôn, which is recorded only in the sense ‘to eat, feed upon’, but is supposed on etymological grounds to have had the wider meaning ‘to take for one's enjoyment’. This would account fairly well for the sense, but involves too much hypothesis to be accepted with confidence. It is curious, if the word be of Germanic formation, that there is no direct proof of its having existed in any Germanic language, nor is it found even in the Latin text of the Frankish laws.

Etymology: < Old French fee, feie (French foie).

Etymology: < fee n.²

Etymology: Origin unknown.