bread

English bread comes from Old English brēad, which meant "fragment, bit, morsel, crumb" as well as "bread," tracing back through Proto-West Germanic *braud to Proto-Germanic *braudą. That in turn likely comes from Proto-Indo-European *bʰrewh₁- ("to boil; to brew"), though it may instead—or also—come from a root meaning "broken piece, fragment," so the two senses may have blended together.

Old English brēad originally leaned toward "crumb" or "fragment" before settling into meaning the whole loaf. It eventually pushed out the Old French borrowing payn and replaced the older English word hlāf ("loaf") as the everyday term for the food.

It's cognate with German Brot, Dutch brood, Swedish bröd, and Icelandic brauð, all descending from the same Germanic root, and may be a doublet of broa.