Etymology of “sentence”

The English word sentence (in both its grammatical and judicial meanings) comes directly from Latin and carries the idea of “a meaningful opinion, thought, or judgment.”Here’s the full path:

• Latin: sententia

  
  

  = “thought, opinion, meaning, judgment, decision”

  
  

  (from sentīre = “to feel, perceive, think, judge” + -tia noun suffix)The original literal meaning of sententia was “a feeling” or “a way of thinking,” but very early it came to mean:

  • a meaningful statement or opinion

  • a judicial decision or verdict (hence our modern legal “sentence”)

• Old French (c. 1200): sentence

  
  

  = “meaning, opinion, judgment, legal verdict, or a short complete saying”

• Middle English (late 13th century): borrowed as sentence

  
  

  First meanings in English:

  1. A judgment or decision (especially in law or church courts)

  2. A wise saying, maxim, or aphorism

  3. The meaning or sense of something

• Grammatical meaning (early 15th century onward)

  
  

  By the 1400s–1500s, English and European grammarians began using sentence to mean “a complete grammatical unit that expresses a thought” — exactly parallel to the original Latin idea of sententia as “a complete, meaningful statement or judgment.”

So the grammatical term sentence literally means “a (complete) thought” or “a unit of meaning” — a direct inheritance from Latin sententia.