scathe: [12] Scathe is now encountered virtually only in the negative form unscathed (first recorded in the 14th century), but originally it was a verb in its own right, meaning ‘harm’. It was borrowed from Old Norse skatha, which was descended from a prehistoric Germanic *skathōjan (source also of German and Dutch schaden ‘harm’). This was formed from a base *skath-, which has links with Irish scathaim ‘mutilate, lame’ and Greek askēthés ‘unhurt’.
