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[OE] Historically, ‘move through the air’ is something of a secondary semantic development for fly. Its distant Indo-European ancestor, *pleu-, denoted rapid motion in general, and in particular ‘flowing’ or ‘floating’, and it produced such offspring as Greek pléo ‘sail, float’ and Sanskrit plu- ‘sail, swim’, as well as English fleet, flood, flow, fowl, plover, and pluvial. An extension to that base, *pleuk-, gave rise to Lithuanian plaukti ‘float, sail, swim’, and to prehistoric West and North Germanic *fleugan, source of German fliegen, Dutch vliegen, Swedish flyga, and English fly, all meaning ‘move with wings’. The insect-name fly is also of considerable antiquity, going back to a prehistoric Germanic derivative *fleugōn or *fleugjōn, but the origins of the adjective fly ‘crafty, sharp’ [19] are not known.
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