hissen

English

hissen

(dialect) Himself.
- 1902, Joseph Wright, The English Dialect Dictionary, Being the Complete Vocabulary of All Dialect Words Still in Use, Or Known to Have Been in Use During the Last Two Hundred Years: H-L‎^[1]:
  It 'ud be a sight better if he kept they to hissen.
- 1893-1937, J. Keighley Snowden, "A Ghost Slayer", in A Bottomless Grave: and Other Victorian Tales of Terror
  It rade ower my father t' week afore he henged hissen—Aw mind him t—tellin' on 't.

hissen

16th century, from Middle Low German hissen, of unknown origin. Possibly the same word as Middle Low German hissen, hitzen, Middle Dutch hissen (modern Dutch ophitsen), Old French hicier, all meaning “to set hounds on”. These can be compared to Proto-Germanic *hatjaną (whence High German hetzen), but the phonetics are highly problematic. Therefore the group is usually considered imitative, immediately comparable to English hiss.

The use for “hoisting” appears first in the mid-15th century in Middle Dutch hîsen (cf. modern Dutch hijsen) and in the Middle English nautical interjection hissa (cf. Scots heeze, English hoise, whence hoist). The word then quickly spread to other Germanic as well as Romance languages. Such cognates include Danish hejse, French hisser, Spanish izar, Italian issare.

hissen (weak, third-person singular present hisst, past tense hisste, past participle gehisst, auxiliary haben)

Conjugation of hissen (weak, auxiliary haben)

¹Rare except in very formal contexts; alternative in würde normally preferred.

Composed forms of hissen (weak, auxiliary haben)

Wolfgang Pfeifer et al., “hissen”, in Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen (1993), digitalized version at DWDS
van der Sijs, Nicoline, editor (2010), “hijsen”, in Etymologiebank, Meertens Institute

hissen