start: [OE] Start originally meant ‘jump, leap, caper’ (‘Him lust not [he did not like] to play nor start, nor to dance, nor to sing’, Chaucer, Romance of the Rose 1366). This gradually evolved via ‘make a sudden movement’ to ‘begin a journey’, but it did not emerge as a fully-fledged synonym for ‘begin’ until the end of the 18th century. Startle [OE], which came from the same Germanic base *start-, has kept more closely to the notion of ‘sudden movement’. => startle