window [ME] Window is from Old Norse vindauga, which literally meant ‘wind eye’. Before that the Anglo-Saxons words were éagthyrl and éagduru, ‘eye hole’ and ‘eye door’. Early windows would generally have been just openings in a wall, sometimes with shutters or curtains. The computing sense ‘a framed area on a screen for viewing information’ was first recorded in 1974, and in 1985 Microsoft released the first version of its Windows operating system. See also eye.