Vertue

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Moral excellence and upright behaviour ; a specific praiseworthy trait of character ; sexual purity, especially of a woman, in older usage ; the inherent power or healing effectiveness of something
2. Righteous conduct and goodness of character ; an admirable personal quality in someone ; chastity, particularly in women, as an archaic sense ; the innate power or curative effect a thing possesses
3. Ethical goodness and principled living ; a single commendable characteristic ; an archaic term for chastity or sexual purity ; the latent power or healing property residing in a substance

Etymology: The spelling "vertue" is simply an older form of "virtue," and for centuries English writers used the two interchangeably. The word's root is a little startling: Latin "virtus" meant manliness, bravery and worth, and it grew out of "vir," the Latin word for "man." Moral excellence, the sense we now think of first, was a later extension of that original idea of a man's strength and courage. The word arrived in English through Anglo-Norman, the French dialect spoken by the post-Conquest elite, where it appeared as "vertu" or "virtu." It came into Middle English in that form, and it is a doublet of "vertu," meaning that French kept a near-identical descendant that developed its own separate sense, closer to artistic taste or a fine object's quality. Before "virtue" took over the moral sense, English had a different word for it: Old English "cræft." That is the same word that survives today as "craft," which once meant the strength, skill or power of a person, and only later narrowed to skilled work.