dust: [OE] The notion ultimately underlying dust seems to be that of ‘smoke’ or ‘vapour’. It goes back to a prehistoric Indo-European base *dheu-, which also produced Latin fūmus and Sanskrit dhūma- ‘smoke’. A Germanic descendant of this, *dunstu-, picks up the idea of a cloud of fine particles being blown about like smoke, and is the basis of Norwegian dust ‘dust’ and duft ‘finely ground grain’, German duft ‘fragrance’ (from an earlier Middle High German tuft ‘vapour, dew’), and English dust.
