charity [OE] Charity begins at carus, the Latin word for ‘dear’. This was the base of Latin caritas, ‘dearness, love’, which eventually gave us the English word. An early sense of charity, in the 12th century, was ‘Christian love of your fellow men’. The modern sense developed from the fact that supporting the needy is one of the qualities of this. The saying charity begins at home, ‘a person’s first responsibility is for the needs of their own family and friends’, dates back to the 14th century.