Language Of Confusion: Ne-, Part II

Back looking at the Proto Indo European root ne-, which means not, so of course most of the words related to it have to do with negation.
 
First, null, which showed up in the mid sixteenth century, a few decades before nullify. It comes from the French nul, which is from the classical Latin nullus, which means none, and none is of course from ne-. As for nullify, the -ify part of it comes from facere, to do or make, and I know I’ve talked about that before, it’s the origin of stuff like factory and feat, among other things.
 
Unsurprisingly, nil is closely related, though it didn’t show up until 1833—before that, it was either nihil or nihilum, both of which are just Latin words for nothing. In Latin, it’s a mix of ne-, not, and hilum, thing. So nil is… nothing.
 
Then there’s annul, which showed up in the late fourteenth century from the Old French anuler and Late Latin annullare, to make into nothing. The a- comes from ad, to, and of course the rest is from nullus, so to annul is to nothing something. Plus we have annihilate, which in addition to being really annoying to spell, still has the hilum part of nothing. It showed up in the mid sixteenth century from the Medieval Latin annihilates, from the verb annihilare, which all mean to reduce to nothing. A- is again from ad, so annihilate is also to nothing something. It just didn’t get rid of the hil part.
 
We also have naught, another word I’ve done before but is being done again. It showed up in the mid fourteenth century meaning an evil act as well as a trifle, or in math, zero, and somewhere along the way it lost the evil part. It comes from the Old English nawiht, nothing, which is literally a mix of na, no, (which is from ne-) and wiht, being, creature, or thing. Naught is ALSO nothing. Nought has the exact same origin, too, we just for some reason changed the A to an O in modern English. And yes, naughty is also related. It showed up in the late fourteenth century meaning needy or having nothing as well as evil or immoral, but then it lost the nothing meaning and kept the evil one. It is yet another word from nawiht, it just evolved the other way.
 
Sources
Online Etymology Dictionary
Google Translate
Omniglot
University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center
University of Texas at San Antonio’s page on Proto Indo European language
Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English
Old English-English Dictionary
Dictionary of Medieval Latin
Orbis Latinus