Other forms: posed, posing, poses
To pose is to hold a position for a picture — or to present a problem. Two senses that share a word and little else.
The photographic sense covers models, portraits and anybody told to stand still, and the noun means the position held. The presenting sense is formal and very common, since something that poses a risk, a threat or a question is creating it. There is a third sense meaning to pretend, since posing as a doctor is an offence, and a poseur is somebody affecting a manner they have not earned.
Old English
ġeposu — cold in the head; catarrh
Middle English
pose
English, today
pose
Built from
From Middle English pose, from Old English ġeposu (“cold in the head; catarrh”) literally “(the) sneezes; (the) snorts”, from Old English pos, ġepos (“sneeze, snort”), from Proto-West Germanic pos, from Proto-Germanic pusą (“sneeze, snort”), from Proto-Germanic pusōną, pusjaną (“to snort, blow”), from pus- (“to blow, breathe hard”), from Proto-Indo-European bew- (“to blow, swell”). Compare Low German pusten (“to blow, puff”), German dialectal pfausen (“to sneeze, snort”), Norwegian dialectal pysa (“to blow”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA