Original meaning seems to be something that was given. So a snake would gift you Poison just like snot nosed brats would gift you a cold during Thanksgiving dinner.
The word has been used as a euphemism for “poison” since Old High German, a semantic loan from Late Latin dosis (“dose”), from Ancient Greek δόσις (dósis, “gift; dose of medicine”).
I wondered how the heck it got that meaning. Pretty strange to apply a term for giving something in general to poison specifically.
It’s an unfortunate false friend that the German word Gift means poison in English.
Funnily there is also the word “Mitgift” (Dowry) that has nothing to do with poison at all and is closer to the english “gift”.
Same root though. In Dutch it wasn’t differentiated until recently so the same word has vastly different meanings between Afrikaans and Dutch. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/gifte#Middle_Low_German
Original meaning seems to be something that was given. So a snake would gift you Poison just like snot nosed brats would gift you a cold during Thanksgiving dinner.
I wondered how the heck it got that meaning. Pretty strange to apply a term for giving something in general to poison specifically.