- of
- \ \ [OE] Of has an ancient ancestry, going back to the prehistoric Indo-European preposition of ‘removal’ or ‘origin’, *ap. Its Germanic descendant was *ab, source of modern German ab (now only an adverb, meaning ‘away’), Dutch af, Swedish av, and English of. Latin ab ‘from’ (as in English abduct, abject, etc) also came from Indo-European *ap.\ \ Cf.⇒ OFF
Word origins - 2ed. J. Ayto. 2005.