Etymology Lesson: kid

This morning I had to ask my friend Adam which he meant, a human kid, or a goat kid and that got me thinking about which came first.  Did we start calling human children kid because they reminded us of goat children?  Or was it the other way ’round?

Turns out it was goats first.  From Proto-Germanic, kidjom, to Old Norse kið, meaning “young goat,” and was pronounced either as kith or kih.  It has no as yet discovered PIE root.  The first recorded use of kid as slang for “child” was made in the 1590s.  The word’s use as a verb, as in kidding, wasn’t recorded until the early 1800s, and meant “to coax, wheedle or hoax.”  

Somewhat related, the word kidnap, is the only surviving form of the word nap in its verb form, meaning not, “a short sleep” but, “to catch or seize.”  We now know this word as nab, but it was originally nap.  The word is likely from a Scandinavian source since there are the words nappe and nappa meaning the same thing in Norwegian and Swedish respectively.