Old English sārig 'pained, distressed', of West Germanic origin, from the base of the noun sore. The shortening of the root vowel has given the word an apparent connection with the unrelated sorrow.

• In the Anglo-Saxon period to be sorry was to be pained or distressed, full of grief or sorrow—the meaning gradually weakened to become ‘sad through sympathy with someone else's misfortune’, ‘full of regret’, and then simply an expression of apology. The source was sore, which originally had the meaning ‘causing intense pain, grievous’ (see also pain). Sorrow is also Old English, but is not closely related to the other two words. The expression more in sorrow than in anger is taken from Shakespeare's Hamlet. When Hamlet asks Horatio to describe the expression on the face of his father's ghost, Horatio replies, ‘a countenance more in sorrow than in anger’.