Words

Window

from Old Norse vindauga, "wind eye"
An opening in a wall for light and air.
Documented

The wind's eye

Old Norse vindauga: vindr (wind) plus auga (eye). It replaced Old English eagthyrel, "eye-hole," and eagduru, "eye-door." English described windows as eyes twice over.

Assessment: Fully documented, among the most poetic verified etymologies in the language.
Stories

The eye-hole that lost the word war

England already had its own name for the opening: eagthyrel, the eye-hole, the hole that watched and breathed. Then the Norse came, settled, intermarried, and their vindauga pushed the English word out of the language so completely that no speaker has said eye-hole for eight hundred years. Before glass, the window was the hall's smoke hole, the one eye through which the house exhaled its fire. Every window in your home is a small Viking victory, a conquest still holding its position in your walls.

Assessment: Both Old English words are attested and extinct; the Norse replacement is documented in Middle English. Total word replacements of household terms usually mark real cultural upheaval, and this one did.
Interesting claims

Architecture as a face

Symbolic readings extend it: a house is a body, windows its eyes, opening one is letting the house see. Feng shui and other traditions do treat openings as organs of a dwelling.

Assessment: A metaphor with real roots in the word itself, but a worldview, not a history.
Sources and further reading
  1. OED, window, from Old Norse vindauga, wind-eye
Worth asking

If your ancestors called windows eyes, what does that reveal about how they saw a house?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+