Plaything is compound of play (Old English plega 'play, sport') + thing (Old English thing 'object, matter'). Important recorded forms include plega (Old English) and þing (Old English). Morphologically, the word preserves a built structure whose named elements carry the historical sense into English. The modern sense remains close to that composition, with the parts narrowing into a single lexical item. In current use it covers a toy, or a person or thing treated as an object of amusement. The wider family includes related words such as play.