v. (wk.)
Gaw past 1 sg. hitte, 3 sg. hit, pp. hitte; Pe pres. 3 sg. hytteʒ; Cl pres. 3 sg. hitteʒ; WA infin. hit, pres. 3 sg. hittis, hitte, past sg. hit
‘to hit, smite; fall, drop to; to chance, attain as a result; come upon, find' (Modern English hit)
PGmc Ancestor
?*hit-atjan or *hiþþijan
Proposed ON Etymon (OIcel representative)
hitta ‘to hit upon, meet; hit, strike’
(ONP hitta (vb.))
Other Scandinavian Reflexes
Far hitta, Icel hitta, Norw hitta, Dan hitte, Sw hitta
OE Cognate
Phonological and morphological markers
Summary category
B2
A few occurrences in late OE (see Hofmann §371, Peters 97, SPS 307); widespread in ME (though MED’s sense 3 ‘to meet’ (etc.) is exemplified only from N and alliterative texts).
Occurrences in the Gersum Corpus
Gaw 427, 1455, 1459, etc.; Pe 132; Cl 479; Pat 289, 380; WA 445, 512, 839 etc.
Gaw 427 hit was emended away by early editions (Madden, Morris, M(G) felle, Mätzner helde), but all subsequent editors have followed Napier (1897: 52) in interpreting it as the past of hitte (see Knott 1915: 105). At Gaw 2511 TGD read hit as the pronoun ‘it’ (see 2511n; they are followed by AW and PS (and Barron, Winny) (and see further vnhap); but other editors take it as an infin. of hitte in the sense ‘ensue, strike’ (thus GDS, Vant 2511n, and see further Menner 1926: 399-400, Wright 1935: 347-8).