onset

UK/ˈɒnˌsɛt/

nounB2+2 meanings Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,940 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: onsets

The onset of something is its beginning, and the thing beginning is nearly always unpleasant: the onset of winter, the onset of a headache, the onset of the disease.

That negative loading is the whole character of the word. Nobody speaks of the onset of a holiday. It is a formal word and it lives mostly in medicine, where sudden onset and rapid onset are standard, and in weather and history writing. There is an older military sense meaning the first shock of an attack, which is where the word came from and which now survives mainly in accounts of battles. Note that onset takes of and never to.

Definitions of onset

1nounonsetThe beginning of something unpleasant.B2+
“The onset of the illness was sudden.”
synonyms: beginning, start, arrival
2nounattackThe first shock of an attack.B2+
“The line held at the first onset and broke at the second.”

Also practised as

nounThe first shock of an assault.

Where it comes from

Middle English
setten
English
set
English, today
onset

Built from

*sed- · Proto-Indo-European — to sit

From on- + set. Compare Old English onsettan (“to impose; oppress, bear down”). For semantic parallels for the meaning to assault, compare cognate Russian насе́сть, наседа́ть. set comes from Middle English setten. From Middle English setten, from Old English settan, from Proto-West Germanic sattjan, from Proto-Germanic satjaną, from Proto-Indo-European sodéyeti, causative of sed- (“to sit”). Cognate with Dutch zetten, German setzen, Danish sætte, Norwegian Bokmål sette, Icelandic and Norwegian Nynorsk setja, Swedish sätta, Faroese seta.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

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