English gift and German Gift are historically related but now mean “present” and “poison,” a deceptive false-friend pair.
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The sequence below summarizes the cited forms, dates and evidence. It is not a complete scholarly history.
According to Merriam-Webster and American Heritage, English gift comes from Old Norse via Middle English and is akin to Old English giefan “to give,” while Duden traces modern German Gift, which means poison, to Old/Middle High German gift “giving/transfer; gift” related to geben “give,” and the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache describes the semantic shift, so the two present-day meanings are a related false-friend pair rather than unrelated words.
This page summarizes the cited sources. Follow each source for its full wording, notes and references.
Word-specific details from cited sources, with sources named beside each claim.
Merriam-Webster and American Heritage trace English gift through Middle English from Old Norse, with Merriam-Webster noting it is akin to Old English giefan “to give”.
Etymonline gives a common Germanic source geftiz and says English retains “something given,” dating the word to the mid-13th century, while Merriam-Webster dates the English noun's first use to the 12th century.
Duden traces modern German Gift, meaning poison, to Old/Middle High German gift, literally “giving/transfer; gift,” related to geben “give”.
The Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache describes the semantic change from giving/gift through medicinal dose to poison.
English gift and German Gift are historically related but now mean “present” and “poison.” Loanwords, cognates and false friends: three different questions
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4 history stepscoffeeArabic qahwa reached English coffee through Turkish; dictionaries differ on the last step, with Italian caffè, Turkish kahve and Dutch koffie all proposed.qahwacoffee
6 history stepsorangeA citrus name crossed Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Occitan and French before English — and named the colour after the fruit.nāraṅgaorange
5 history stepsschoolGreek scholē began with leisure, discussion and learning before the word reached English — while a different word entirely gave us schools of fish.scholēschool