The word "damnation" has a long and complicated history. How it entered the English language and answering the questions of how, when and why it came to mean the things it does are difficult to answer. It can be used to mean to condemn or condemn specifically to the hall (by God) and can be used as mild vulgarity. Tracing the path it took to become both a religious term and a swear word shows many interesting features of the language and the ways in which it is used. The word "damned" entered the English language from the Old French word Damne-r during Middle English. period and first appeared in writing at the beginning of the 14th century. (OED, dammit). In Latin the worddamnā-re meant to harm, to injure, or to condemn, which, with the suffix con-, meaning together or intensive, became the French and English word for more or less to condemn. It did not assume its current spelling until the 16th century; before it was sometimes written or . It is now written and pronounced /dæm/. To understand what the word originally meant, we need to look at what kind of word it was and who was using it when it was first borrowed into the language. Most of Damn's first written appearances are religious texts. It first appeared in Cursor Mundi (OED sv Damn 1), a Middle English poem describing world history based primarily on the Christian Bible. Since so many manuscripts of this poem have survived, we can assume that it was popular (Watson 334), therefore probably also influential. The Oxford English Dictionary cites this text twice in defining damnation, once as “[t]o pronounce an adverse judgment upon, affirm to be guilty; pronounce a judicial sentence against” (OED sv Damn 1 a), and once as “[t]o sentence to a particular punishment...... half of the document .......oed.com/entry/ 50124865 >Kearse, Randy “Mo Betta. Street Talk: the official guide to hip-hop and urban language. Fort Lee: Barricade Books, 2006. Metzger, Bruce, M. The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001. Rawson, Hugh. Evil. New York: Crown Publishers, 1989. Smith, Jeremy J. “The Use of English: Language Contact, Dialect Variation, and Written Standardization During the Middle English Period.” English in its social contexts. Eds. Charles T. Scott, Tim William Machan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 47–68.Watson, Nicholas. “The Politics of Writing in Middle English.” The idea of ​​the vernacular: an anthology of Middle English theory 1280–1520. Eds. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, et al. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. 331–352.