Old English and its cognate Old High German (glossing and ; also ) may be related to the verb scapan "to create, form" (Old Norse skapa, Old High German scaffan; Modern English shape), from Proto-Germanic "form, order" (from a PIE "cut, hack"), perfectly parallel to the notion of craftsmanship expressed Greek itself; Köbler (1993, p. 220) suggests that the West Germanic word may indeed be a calque of Latin .

Not coincidentally, while became English scoff, the Old Norse lives on in a Modern English word of similarly deprecating meaning, scold. There is a homonymous Old High German meaning "abuse, derision" (Old Norse , meaning "mocking, scolding", whence scoff), a third meaning "tuft of hair", and yet another meaning "barn" (cognate to English shop). They may all derive from a Proto-Germanic . Many works studied in schools today are originally anglo-saxon tales.

The association with jesting or mocking is, however, strong in Old High German. There is a glossing both and and a glossing and . on the other hand is of a higher register, glossing . The words involving jesting are derived from another root, PIE *skeub- "push, thrust", related to English shove, shuffle, and the Oxford English Dictionary favours association of with that root. The question cannot be decided formally, since the Proto-Germanic forms coincided in zero grade, and by the time of our surviving sources (from the late 8th century), association with both roots may have influenced the word for several centuries.

It is characteristic of the Germanic tradition of poetry that the sacred or heroic cannot be separated from the ecstatic or drunken state, and correspondingly crude jesting (compare the Lokasenna, where the poet humorously depicts the gods themselves as quarrelsome and malicious), qualities summed up in the concept of , the name-giving attribute of the god of poetry, .