Sticking to Your last.

The other day Nelson Goering commented on Facebook as follows (I’ve added italics):

I never quite know what to say when students ask me what something like lāst means in Old English. It means… lāst. It just doesn’t map all that well onto any given PDE word. I should maybe try to think how I can explain more clearly why hunting for the right word in translation is at best a distraction.

(PDE = present-day English.) When I responded that sometimes a gloss can be helpful, he said:

Sure, I also give glosses (and make glossaries) all the time. But sometimes it’s really not effective. To stick with lāst, this properly means “the space someone/something used to occupy, or the after-effects that show where someone/something used to be”. It just isn’t true that “you can often think of it as ‘footstep’ or ‘trace’” — you can *sometimes* think of it that way, but more often that won’t really do, and you can easily end up doing more work trying to figure out how to make your bad gloss fit into the context than it would take to just learn the actual meaning. It’s not actually a very hard word to understand on its own terms, but the hunt for a *gloss* rather than an *explanation* is a problem.

I agreed, of course, and it all led me to look the word up, whereupon I discovered that it’s the ancestor of modern last ‘A model of the foot made of wood, metal, (now) plastic, etc., on which boots and shoes are shaped during making or manufacture’; since the OED entry was revised in 2014, I can give you a nice up-to-date etymology:

Cognate with Old Frisian lāst, lēst, probably ‘sole of the foot’ or ‘footprint’, Middle Dutch lēst, leest form, model, figure, shoemaker’s last (Dutch leest), Middle Low German lēst, leist shoemaker’s last, Old High German leist shoemaker’s last, (in waganleist cart track, wheel rut) track (Middle High German leist shoemaker’s last, track, path, German Leist, Leiste, (now usually) Leisten shoemaker’s last), Old Icelandic leistr foot, sock, Swedish läst stocking foot, sock, shoemaker’s last, Danish læst shoemaker’s last, model, Gothic laists track, trace < a suffixed form (compare ‑t suffix³) of the base of Middle Dutch lese track, Old Saxon ‑lēsa track (in waganlēsa cart track, wheel rut), Old High German ‑leisa (in waganleisa; Middle High German leis, leise, (with prefix) geleis path, track, German Geleise, Gleise, Gleis track) < the same Germanic base as learn v. and lore n.¹

Notes
The Old English forms apparently reflect more than one formation from the same Germanic base. The more common stem form in sense 1 [A mark or trace left on the ground by the foot; a footprint, a track; a footstep; (also) the sole or lower part of the foot] is lāst, but a by-form showing i-mutation (lǣst) is also attested. The word is chiefly attested as a strong masculine in this sense, but in compounds showing this sense apparently sometimes a strong feminine (compare especially fōtlǣst footprint, track, footstep, the sole of the foot; < foot n. + last n.¹). In sense 2 [A model of the foot made of wood, metal, (now) plastic, etc.] the word is attested more rarely in Old English and only with the stem form showing i-mutation; it probably inflects as a strong masculine or neuter (ja-stem) lǣste.

Middle English lēst- (which continues sense 2) shows the expected reflex of Old English lǣst-. However, the stem vowel of the modern English standard form appears to show the reflex of Middle English short ă (with later lengthening before the voiceless fricative in some southern or RP varieties: see A n.). This could have arisen by early shortening of Old English lǣst-, or alternatively by shortening of the early and northern Middle English reflex of Old English lāst-.

Compare (with sense 2) Old English lǣstwyrhta, precise sense uncertain, either ‘shoemaker’, ‘hosier’, or ‘last-maker’, and Old English (rare) fōtlǣstlēas (of stockings) having no soles.

The first citation for the word is from Beowulf 132 “syðþan hie þæs laðan last sceawedon” [when once had been traced the trail of the fiend]; it’s interesting that Scots developed a sense (now obsolete) “In negative contexts: a single thing, anything or any extent at all,” with examples like “Oure verray spouse, rekis nocht a laste hou foule ore vnfaire we be” and “Fellony..louit neuir his lord a last Bot he ware tyrand at the maist.” The “shoemaker’s last” sense also goes back to Old English:

OE Calopodium uel mustricula, læste.
Antwerp-London Glossary (2011) 65

And by googling fōtlǣstlēas (in a fruitless attempt to find out where it occurs) I discovered Javier Martín Arista & Raquel Mateo Mendaza, Nerthus. Outline of a Lexicon of Old English (pdf): “As a step towards a lexicon of Old English based on structural-functional principles, this document synthesizes the meaning definitions provided by the standard dictionaries of Old English.” Could be useful. [My attempt to link to it didn’t work, but google fōtlǣstlēas and you should get it.]