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[OE] A brand was originally a ‘piece of burning wood’; the word comes from West and North Germanic *brandaz, a derivative of the same base (*bran-, *bren-) as produced burn, brandy, and perhaps broil. In the 16th century it came to be applied to an ‘(identifying) mark made with a hot iron’, which provided the basis for the modern sense ‘particular make of goods’, a 19th-century development. A specialized (now archaic) sense of the word in English and other Germanic languages was ‘sword’ (perhaps from the flashing sword blade’s resemblance to a burning stick). This was borrowed into Vulgar Latin as *brando, and its derived verb *brandīre came into English via Old French as brandish [14]. Brand-new [16] may be from the notion of emerging pristine from the furnace.
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