In Old English weird, then spelled wyrd, was a noun meaning ‘destiny, fate’, or, in the plural, ‘the Fates’ (the three goddesses supposed to determine the course of human life); it also meant ‘an event or occurrence’. The adjective, first recorded in Middle English, meant ‘having the power to control destiny’, and was used especially in the phrase the Weird Sisters (originally meaning the Fates, later applied to the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth). The modern sense ‘uncanny, strange’ did not develop until the early 19th century.