often confused with the Old English word , meaning 'a forested area', but this word eventually morphed into the modern version, wild. The Old English word for welding iron was ('to bring together') or ('to bring together hot', with hot more relating to red-hot or a swelling rage; in contrast to , 'to bind together with rope or fasteners'). The term weld is derived from the Middle English verb well (; plural/present tense: ) or welling (), meaning 'to heat' (to the maximum temperature possible); 'to bring to a boil'. The modern word was probably derived from the past-tense participle welled (), with the addition of d for this purpose being common in the Germanic languages of the Angles and Saxons. It was first recorded in English in 1590, from a version of the Christian Bible that was originally translated into English by John Wycliffe in the fourteenth century. The original version, from Isaiah 2:4, reads, "" (they shall beat together their swords into plowshares), while the 1590 version was changed to, "" (they shall weld together their swords into plowshares), suggesting this particular use of the word probably became popular in English sometime between these periods. The word is derived from the Old Swedish word , meaning 'to boil'. Sweden was a large exporter of iron during the Middle Ages, and many other European languages used different words but with the same meaning to refer to welding iron, such as the Illyrian (Greek) ('to boil'), Turkish ('to boil'), Grison (Swiss) ('to boil'), or the Lettish (Latvian) ('to weld or solder', derived from , 'to boil'). In Swedish, however, the word only referred to joining metals when combined with the word for iron (), as in (literally: 'to boil iron'). The word possibly entered English from the Swedish iron trade, or possibly was imported with the thousands of Viking settlements that arrived in England before and during the Viking Age, as more than half of the most common English words in everyday use are Scandinavian in origin. History The history of joining metals goes back several millennia. The earliest examples of this come from the Bronze and Iron Ages in Europe and the Middle East. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus states in The Histories of the 5th century BC that Glaucus of Chios "was the man who single-handedly invented iron welding". Welding was used in the construction of the Iron