business [OE] Old English bisignis meant ‘anxiety’, but the main early sense, which lasted from the Middle Ages down to the 18th century, was ‘the state of being busy’. The modern senses began to develop in the later Middle Ages, and the meanings existed happily in parallel for several hundred years. Then people began to feel that a clear distinction needed to be made between simply being busy [OE] and having business to attend to. In the early 19th century this resulted in the form busyness, the exact equivalent of medieval bisignis.