How words of praise, blame and respect changed their meaning.
villain (n.)
Collection
How We Judge
The villain in a story has a name that once belonged to a villager. The word comes through French from Medieval Latin villanus, a rural inhabitant or farm worker, derived from villa.12
In medieval usage, the name carried the contempt of people who ranked themselves above those who worked the land. A person of low birth was assumed to have coarse manners. The judgement then extended to morals: someone considered uncouth became someone considered wicked. 1
By the sixteenth century villain could mean a scoundrel. The familiar use for a character whose evil actions drive a play or novel came later. The spelling villein kept the historical sense of a peasant bound to a lord’s land, while villain became the usual form of the insult. 2
The villain was the most interesting character in the play.