far

\ \ [OE] Far is a word of ancient ancestry. It goes back to Indo-European *per-, which also produced Greek pérā ‘beyond, further’ and Sanskrit paras ‘beyond’. The Germanic descendant of the Indo-European form was *fer-, whose comparative form *ferrō ‘further’ passed into Old English as feorr, having lost its comparative connotations and come to mean simply ‘far’. The Old English comparative was fierr, but in early Middle English this too lost its comparative force and a new form was created with the -er ending, ferrer, later farrer. This in turn was gradually replaced by further (a completely different – although probably distantly related – word, based on forth), of which farther is a 13th-century variant modelled on far.