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Original meaning and derivation of the word Viking

One theory suggests that the word's origin is from the Old English wicing and the Old Frisian wizing that are almost 300 years older, and probably derive from wic, related to the Latin vicus "village, habitation". Another less popular theory is that víking came from the feminine vík, meaning "creek, inlet, small bay".

It has been suggested that the word viking may be derived from the name of the historical Norwegian district of Víkin, meaning "a person from Víkin ", but people from the Viken area were called víkverir, ('Vík dwellers'), not "Viking", in Old Norse manuscripts. The explanation could explain only the masculine grammatical gender (víkingr) and not the feminine (víking); the masculine is more easily derived from the feminine than the other way around.

Another etymology that gained support in the early 21st century derives Viking from the same root as Old Norse vika, f. 'sea mile', originally meaning 'the distance between two shifts of rowers', from the root * weik or *wîk, as in the Proto-Germanic verb *wîkan, 'to recede'. This is found in the early Nordic verb *wikan, 'to turn', similar to Old Icelandic víkja (ýkva, víkva) 'to move, to turn', with "well-attested nautical usages", according to Bernard Mees. This theory is better attested linguistically, and the term most likely predates the use of the sail by the Germanic peoples of northwestern Europe, because the Old Frisian spelling Witsing or Wīsing shows that the word was pronounced with a palatal k and thus in all probability existed in North-Western Germanic before that palatalisation happened in the 5th century or before (in the western branch).

The Old Norse feminine víking (as in the phrase fara í víking) may originally have been a long-distance sea journey characterised by the shifting of rowers, and a víkingr (masculine gender) would originally have been a participant on such a sea journey. In that case, the idea behind it seems to be that the tired rower moves aside on the thwart when he is relieved by the rested rower. This implies that the word Viking was not originally connected to Scandinavian seafarers, but assumed this meaning when the Scandinavians began to dominate the seas. Even the word vikingr did not necessarily possess negative overtones, nor was it always associated with violence, and only in the post-Viking age would negative overtones be attached to the word.