Etymology: Old English godspel , doubtless originally gód spel (see good adj. and spell n.¹), good tidings (compare láð spel evil tidings), a rendering of the Latin bona adnuntiatio ( Corpus Gloss. Int. 117) or bonus nuntius (‘Euuangelium , id est, bonum nuntium, godspel’, Voc. c1050 in Wright-Wülcker 314/8), which was current as an explanation of the etymological sense of Latin evangelium , Greek εὐαγγέλιον (see evangely n.). Compare Gothic þiuþspillôn ‘to preach the gospel’ (εὐαγγελίζεσθαι ), < þiuþ-s good + spillôn to announce (cognate with spell n.¹). When the phrase gód spel was adopted as the regular translation of evangelium , the ambiguity of its written form led to its being interpreted as a compound, gŏd-spel , < god n. and int. + spel in the sense ‘discourse’ or ‘story’. The mistake was very natural, as the resulting sense was much more obviously appropriate than that of ‘good tidings’ for a word which was chiefly known as the name of a sacred book or of a portion of the liturgy. From Old English the word passed, in adapted forms, into the languages of the Germanic peoples evangelized from England: Old Saxon godspell, Old High German gotspell, Old Norse guð-, goðspiall; in each case the form of the first element shows unequivocally that it was identified with God, not with good. The Old Norse form has survived into modern Icelandic; the continental Germanic languages early discarded the word for adoptions of Latin evangelium. Although the ó in Old English gódspel would necessarily in time have been shortened by the regular operation of phonetic law, it does not appear that this process could have taken place early enough to account for the form of the word in Old Saxon and Old High German. The form gŏdspel must therefore (as above explained) be due to a misinterpretation of the written form, originating before the word had any oral currency.

Etymology: < gospel n.; in Old English godspellian.