justice

Justice comes from Middle English justice, from Old French justise, from Latin iūstitia ("righteousness, equity"), from iūstus ("just"), from iūs ("right"), from Proto-Italic *jowos, a term that may have literally meant "sacred formula" and belonged to Latin's religious cults, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₂yew-.

The word traveled from a religious sense of formula or right, through Latin's abstract notion of righteousness, into French and then English, where it settled into its legal and moral sense. In English it partly displaced the native Old English word rihtwīsnes, which survives today as righteousness.

Justice is a doublet of Justitia, both descending from the same Latin root iūstitia through different paths.