In honor of the launch day we have today at @directus, here are some historical facts about the word "LAUNCH" 🚀 The Middle English launchen (around 1300s) meant things like “to rush,” “leap,” or “set suddenly in motion.” It came from Old French lancher/lancier, meaning “to fling, hurl, or throw.” And that leads to a lance. The French word ultimately comes from Late Latin lanceare, “to wield a lance,” derived from lancea, a light spear. So launch and lance are relatives. Around the 1400s, “launching” a ship meant putting it into the water. Then it became metaphorical. By around 1600, launch was being generalized to mean starting or setting something in motion (business, career, product). Rockets are surprisingly recent. The use of launch for the liftoff of missiles and spacecraft dates only to around 1935, while launch pad appears around 1960. There’s a linguistic curveball: a launch, meaning a type of boat, appears to have a different origin from the verb to launch. That noun entered English in the late 1600s through Portuguese lancha. The spelling seems to have been influenced by the already-existing English verb launch.