Nov 6, 2019, 6:57 AM Thing (assembly) – Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org
THING(THANG,DING): JURY > ASSEMBLY > SENATE > LEGISLATURE
A thing was a governing assembly in early Germanic society, made up of the free people of the community presided over by law-speakers. The word appears in Old Norse, Old English, and modern Icelandic as þing, in Middle English (as in modern English), Old Saxon, Old Dutch, and Old Frisian as thing, in German as Ding, and in modern Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Faroese, Gutnish, and Norn as ting, all from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic neuter *þingą; the word is the same as the more common English word thing, both having at their heart the basic meaning of “an assemblage, a coming together of parts”—in the one case, an “assembly” or “meeting”, in the other, an “entity”, “object”, or “thing”. The meeting-place of a thing was called a “thingstead” (Old English þingstede) or “thingstow” (Old English þingstōw). The Anglo-Saxon folkmoot (Old English folcgemōt, “folk meeting”; Middle English folkesmōt; modern Norwegian folkemøte) was analogous, the forerunner to the witenagemōt and a precursor of the modern Parliament of the United Kingdom. Today the term lives on in the English term hustings, in the official names of national legislatures and political and judicial institutions of Nordic countries and, in the Manx form tyn, as a term for the three legislative bodies on the Isle of Man.