" owing it "

[Verb]  | "owe" | \ ˈō \

1: to be under obligation to pay or repay in return for something received : be indebted in the sum of

2: to be under obligation to render (something, such as duty or service)

3: to be indebted to

Origin: before 12th century ;

 Middle English aghen, aughen, ouen, ouwen "to have, possess, own, owe (money, a debt), be obligated to render, be supposed to, ought," going back to Old English āgan (1st &3rd singular present tense āh, āg, plural āgon, past tense āhte, past participle āgen) "to possess, own, have, come into possession of, have as an obligation," going back to Germanic *aigan- "to possess" (whence also Old Frisian āga, ēga "to possess, be obligated to," Old Saxon ēgan "to have, possess," Middle Dutch eigen, Old High German eigan, Old Icelandic eiga, Gothic aigan), going back to a reduplicated perfect *He-Hói̯ḱ-/He-Hiḱ- of an Indo-European verbal base *Heiḱ- "appropriate, acquire," whence also Sanskrit ī́śe "(s/he) owns, possesses, is master of," Avestan ise "(s/he) is lord over," and perhaps Tocharian B aik- "know, recognize" (assuming a shift in sense from physical possession to mental possession);

  * Note : Old English āgan was a preterit-present verb, as were the modal auxiliaries which survive in Modern English as {can:1|can:1}, {shall|shall}, {must:1|must:1}, {may;1|may:1}, etc. In Middle English the weak past tense forms oȝte, oughte, etc., descended from Old English āhte, gradually lost tense reference and transitioned to an independent modal verb, continued into Modern English as {ought:1|ought:1}. (The original senses "owe" and "own, possess" survived longer in Scots ought, aucht, aicht, etc.—see: {ought:2|ought:2}.) As this occurred, a regularized past tense and participle oued appeared. The sense "be obligated to pay, owe" and more generally "be obliged to, have to" arose already in Old English: in the Lindisfarne Gospels agan to gyldenne "have (something) to pay" was used to gloss Latin dēbēre "to be obliged to render, owe"—hence redde quod debes "pay me that thou owest" (Matthew 18:28, KJV) was rendered "geld [money] þæt ðu aht to geldanne." (An edition of the Old English Gospels based on the Corpus Christi College, Cambridge manuscript has "Agyf þæt þu me scealt," using a form of the modal verb sceal {shall|shall} to render dēbēre). This semantic shift is parallel to that of have, by which "to have something to do" is in effect reanalyzed as "to have to do something." — Compare also {own:1|own:1}.;