Aroynt

Aroynt Thee, Etymology!
The Bizarre History of the Word Used Only to Insult Witches

The English language is packed with beautifully aggressive ways to tell someone to go away. We have "begone," "avaunt," "scram," and "get lost." But at the absolute pinnacle of linguistic hostility sits a word so deeply specific, so utterly mysterious, and so completely aggressive that it hasn't been spoken out loud in polite society for approximately four hundred years: "Aroynt".

Usually paired exclusively with the pronoun "thee", aroynt is an archaic imperative verb that translates roughly to: "Be off, vanish into thin air, and please take your magical curses somewhere else."

The most brilliant thing about aroynt is that nobody actually knows where it came from. It simply materialized out of the historical fog, insulted a few supernatural entities, and then hid inside literature textbooks forever.

The Shakespearean Monopoly

If you have ever encountered this word, you can blame one man: William Shakespeare. Etymologists have scoured historical documents for centuries, and every single recorded use of the word aroynt in human history traces back to exactly two passages written by the Bard.

The word makes its grand debut in Macbeth (Act 1, Scene 3), when a sailor's wife refuses to share her chestnuts with a hungry witch. The witch, understandably miffed, recounts the encounter to her supernatural sisters:

"‘Aroynt thee, witch!’ the rump-fed ronyon cries."

Shakespeare evidently loved this specific insult so much that he dragged it out of his toolbox again for King Lear (Act 3, Scene 4), where Edgar, pretending to be a madman out in a storm, rants about warding off nightmares and foul fiends:

"And, aroynt thee, witch, aroynt thee!"

Because Shakespeare used it twice, English literature professors have spent generations pretending it's a completely normal part of our linguistic heritage, rather than a word William probably made up on a Tuesday because he needed something that rhythmically matched "ronyon".

The Wild Theories of the Etymologists

Because dictionaries hate listing a word's origin as "we have absolutely no idea, stop asking," philologists have spent centuries concocting increasingly unhinged theories about where aroynt came from.

• The Cow-Calming Hypothesis: One popular 18th-century theory suggests the word is a corruption of the regional Cheshire dialect phrase "Rynt thee". This was a command milkmaids shouted at cows when the animals refused to move out of the way because they were suspected of being under a witch's spell. So, a word used to scold a stubborn dairy cow somehow evolved into a high-stakes dramatic shield against the dark arts.
• The Rowan Tree Formula: Linguist Anatoly Liberman proposed that aroynt thee might be a heavily mangled contraction of "a rowan tree". Rowan wood was famous in medieval folklore for its anti-witch properties. Saying "aroynt thee" was the verbal equivalent of brandishing a magical stick at your enemy.
• The Flight Ointment Mistake: Some scholars argue the word is just a giant 400-year-old typo in the First Folio. They suggest Shakespeare actually wrote "anoint thee," ordering the witch to grease herself up with her magical flying ointment and fly away.

Summary

Terry Webbs

Ultimately, the origin of aroynt remains the ultimate etymological cold case. It is a word born out of theatrical spite, designed to protect chestnuts, calm dairy cattle, and confuse high school English students for all eternity.