adverbs - Explanation of "must needs"


Recently I ran across the sentence:



"Just why the law prescribed thirty-nine lashes instead of forty or forty-one and so on, must needs remain unanswered."



How did a plural verb like "needs" wind up as an adverb? Is it alone in this phenomenon, or are there other examples that appear to be an odd misplacement of a second verb, but are actually adverbs as well?



Answer



Needs is an old-fashioned or even archaic adverb in modern English. It comes from the noun need and the Germanic masculine/neuter genitive ending -s, which at some point in time came to be used in older English and other Germanic languages to form adverbs. From the Oxford English Dictionary:



In once, twice, thrice, hence, since, etc., the suffix is written differently. In against, alongst, amongst, amidst, and the dialectal onst (see once), the original -es, -s has become -st.



This suffix is still frequent and semi-productive with other stems in Dutch: onverwachts "unexpectedly", daags na "a day after", etc. I believe German has similar examples. English always, sideways etc. contain the same suffix.


In Old English or earlier, before the emergence of the adverbial suffix -s, there existed several masculine and neuter words in the genitive case—which ended on -(e)s—that were used adverbially: dæges "by day", nédes "needs", þances "voluntarily". By analogy, this masculine/neuter genitive ending was extended to make adverbs out of feminine nouns as well, as in nihtes "by night". From there it became a general adverbial suffix. (Examples were taken from the OED.)


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