tall

The ancestral meaning of tall is ‘quick’. It is a descendant of Old English getæl ‘quick, ready’, whose relatives included Old Frisian tel and Old High German gizal ‘quick’, and which may go back ultimately to the prehistoric Germanic base *tal- (source of English tale, talk, and tell). By the time of its re-emergence in middle English it was being used for ‘brave, bold’, but the modern sense ‘of great height’ did not develop until the 16th century.