weird [OE] To the Anglo-Saxons weird was a noun, spelled wyrd and meaning ‘fate, destiny’. The Weirds were the *Fates, the three Greek goddesses who presided over the birth and life of humans. The adjective originally meant ‘having the power to control destiny’, and was used especially from the Middle Ages in the Weird Sisters, for the Fates, and later also the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The modern use, ‘very strange, bizarre’, as in weird and wonderful, dates from the early 19th century.