Other forms: encouraged, encouraging, encourages
To encourage somebody is to say or do the thing that makes them believe they can try. A teacher telling a nervous child to put a hand up, a crowd shouting for the runner who is coming in last.
The pattern is encourage somebody TO DO something: she encouraged me to apply. It works on things as well as people — warm wet weather encourages mould, cheap tickets encourage travel — and there it means make more likely, with no kindness in it at all. The noun is encouragement, an encouraging sign is a hopeful one, and the opposite is discourage. Courage is sitting there in the middle of the word, which is exactly the idea: putting some into somebody who is short of it.
Encourage came into Middle English as encouragen from Anglo-Norman encoragier and Old French encoragier. It pushed out a whole set of Old English words that had been doing the job — hiertan, tyhtan and trymman — none of which survived into modern English.
Old French
encoragier
Anglo-Norman
encoragier
Middle English
encouragen
English, today
encourage
From Middle English encouragen, encoragen, from Anglo-Norman encoragier, from Old French encoragier. Displaced native Old English hiertan, tyhtan, and trymman. by surface analysis, en + en + courage.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA