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[OE] The ‘meting out of judgement’ is the etymological notion immediately underlying ordeal, but at a more primitive level still than that it denotes simply ‘distribution, giving out shares’. It comes ultimately from prehistoric Germanic *uzdailjan ‘share out’, a compound verb formed from *uz- ‘out’ and *dailjan, ancestor of English deal. The noun derived from this was *uzdailjam, and it came to be used over the centuries for the ‘handing out of judgements’ (modern German urteil, for instance, means among other things ‘judicial verdict or sentence’). Its Old English descendant, ordāl, denoted specifically a ‘trial in which a person’s guilt or innocence were determined by a hazardous physical test, such as holding on to red-hot iron’, but the metaphorical extension to any ‘trying experience’ did not take place until as recently as the mid-17th century.
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