Sally comes from Middle French saillie ('a rushing forth'), from saillir ('to leap, rush'), from Latin salire ('to leap, spring'). The historical chain includes Middle French saillie and Latin salire. Older glosses in the chain include "a rushing forth", "to leap, rush", and "to leap, spring", which help explain the semantic range of the modern word. Morphologically, sally is best read as borrowing, yielding an English noun and verb shaped by both form history and later usage. In current English it functions as a noun and verb, with the sense "a sudden rush forward, especially a sortie; a witty remark; to rush out". related forms include salient, assail, and resilient. The result is an English noun and verb whose etymology preserves the older forms while supporting the word's specialized modern meaning.