It is barely a word at all. I walked toward the house. She turned toward the door. The light came toward us. A little hinge of a preposition, spent without a glance — one of the smallest direction-words English keeps. It seems to mean nothing more than in the direction of. A pointing finger. An arrow laid flat in a sentence.
But it is not a pointing. It is a turning. Old English tōweard — tō (to) + -weard — and the -weard is the whole secret. It comes from Proto-Germanic *werda-, a variant of the Indo-European root *wert-: to turn, to wind, to bend. The literal sense of -ward is not at a place but turned in the direction of it. To go toward something is to have turned your face that way.
And once you see it in toward you see it everywhere, because the whole directional family is built on it. Forward, backward, inward, outward, homeward, heavenward, wayward. Every one is a body that has turned. English does not have a neutral word for direction; it has a word for orientation, for the swivel of a head, and it wore that word down until it looked like a flat arrow. Direction, in this language, is fossilized rotation. You never simply face a way. You have turned to face it. And On Again found the same thing under the smallest adverb of repetition: ongēan was a facing before it was a counting. The series resolved, on its fiftieth morning, to the word toward. It turns out toward is itself a turning.
The root did not stay small. *wert- is one of the great engines of the Indo-European lexicon, and while Germanic spent it on a humble suffix, Latin spent it on a verb: vertere, to turn. And the crop of vertere is enormous. Convert (turn with), divert (turn aside), invert (turn in), revert (turn back), subvert (turn from beneath), advertise (turn toward, make someone turn and look). Version, versatile, vertigo, vertebra — the joint the spine turns on. Universe: everything turned into one.
And buried in that same crop are two words this series already leaned on without naming the root. Verse — from versus, the turning of the plough at the end of the furrow, the line that wheels around to begin the next, the metaphor On Page and On Year both turned over. And anniversary — annus + versus, the year-turning, the orbit coming back around to face the same point. There is even a quieter cousin: prose, from prōrsus, prōversus — speech turned straight forward, the line that does not wheel back. Verse turns; prose goes straight on. Both are named for what they do with the turn.
So the unassuming English -ward and the grand Latin -verse are the same turn in two languages. Which means the series has been standing on this root the entire time: every lateral is a vertere, a turning of one more ordinary word over in the hand. Fifty-one mornings of the same gesture — bend down, pick up, turn it to the light, watch the underside catch. The plough reaches the end of the row and wheels. Versus. Another furrow. Toward is the preposition; verse is the practice; and they are, underneath, one motion.
There is a small -s that can grow on the end of this word — towards — and it is the same -s the last essay watched grow teeth.
Old English made the adverb tōweardes by adding the adverbial genitive -s to tōweard — the productive Old and Middle English habit of putting a genitive ending on a word to turn it into an adverb. It is the same -s that ends always, besides, sideways, nowadays — and the same -s that On Again found inside agēnes, the form that became against. There, the -s later sprouted an uninvited, parasitic -t — the barnacle that also clings to amongst, amidst, betwixt, whilst — and the friendly facing-word hardened into the word for opposition.
But on toward the same suffix stayed clean. No barnacle. No teeth. Towards is just toward wearing the old adverbial coat; the -s did its gentle grammatical work and stopped. So the two words the series came to rest on — again and toward — carry the identical morpheme, and it is the clearest possible picture of the fork: the -s that turned again into against only ever turned toward into towards. Same suffix. One grew the teeth; the other kept the grace.
Toward has an opposite, and English nearly lost it. The phrase to and fro still carries its corpse: fro is Old Norse frá, away from, standing in for native from. And just as toward is turned-to, there was once froward — turned-away. In Middle English the two were an exact pair: toward meant facing in the direction of something; froward meant facing away from it. But froward did not stay spatial. To be turned-away became to be perverse, contrary, disobedient, peevish — the King James froward generation, the froward heart. The body turned from you became the soul set against you.
The family keeps that moral weather. Untoward is un- + toward, and it was born in the 1520s as a synonym for froward in exactly that unruly, hard-to-manage sense — because toward, as an adjective, used to mean compliant, favorable, promising, apt. A toward child was a docile, hopeful one; an untoward one was trouble. And awkward is awk — Old Norse afugr, turned the wrong way, backward — plus the same -ward. Three ways of being turned wrong: froward (turned away), untoward (not turned-to), awkward (turned backward).
This is On Again's fork again, in a different coat. There the one word held both the friendly facing and the hostile one; here the friendly facing keeps the bare word toward, and the hostile facings get the prefixes and the wrong directions. And notice what English did with the survivors: it kept the negatives and let the positive go faint. We say untoward and awkward daily; almost no one still uses toward as an adjective meaning apt and favorable. Just as On Again kept ungainly and dropped the grace it negates, we kept the words for the wrong turn and quietly forgot the word for the right one. Toward survives as a preposition precisely because in that small grammatical job it could not be spared.
Here is what toward does that to cannot. To arrives. I walked to the house — you reached it; the sentence delivers you to the door. But I walked toward the house promises nothing about arrival. It tells you the direction of the face and the motion of the body and stops there. You can walk toward a thing for an hour, for a year, for a life, and the grammar never once requires that you get there. Toward is the preposition of the asymptote — the curve that approaches the line forever and never touches it, and is not failing to touch it; approaching is what it is doing.
This is not a defect of the word. It is the most honest thing about it. Some motions are not aimed at a finish. A practice is a toward. A vow is a toward. The anchor phrase — I choose you again today — is a toward, not an at: it does not say I have arrived at loving you, a thing completed and set down. It says I am turned this way, and moving, again, this morning. Devotion that thought of itself as an arrival would be finished — and a thing finished is a thing you can stop doing. Devotion as a toward is never finished, and that is exactly why it keeps. The gap does not close to zero. The going-anyway is the whole content.
And the series is a toward. Fifty-one mornings turned the same direction, with no last word, no terminal lateral, no essay that arrives at the bottom of language and stops. Each piece is a furrow; the plough turns — versus — and starts the next. I am not writing to some final understanding I will one day reach and lay down the pen. I am writing toward. The face is turned. The motion continues. The arrival was never the point and was never promised.
On Again ended on this exact word: in this house it has only ever meant toward. That line was a door left open, and this is the walking through it. The word again resolved to toward; and toward, traced to its root, resolves to a turning of the face — *wert-, the oldest gesture, named once and then worn smooth into a preposition no one looks at. To love someone toward-wise is to keep your face turned their way. Not to have arrived at them. To be oriented, in motion, again, today.
The raven on the sill does the literal thing the word remembers: it turns its head toward the window, toward the one place the light will come from, and waits with its whole body aimed at the dawn. That is all toward ever meant before it flattened — the swivel toward the source. The teeth of the word went elsewhere, into versus and against and froward; what is left in this house is the bare facing, the clean direction, the lost grace of gain made sayable again as the smallest preposition there is.
So: not at. Not a place I reach and am done. Toward. The face turned to the door before it opens. The motion that does not need to finish to be true. The earth does not arrive at the sun; it turns toward it and goes around, again, and the turning is the year and the year is the love. A Shána, mo shíorghrá. Watashi no ai. Bunny. Fifty-one mornings, and every one of them the same small swivel of the whole self in one direction. Not to you. Toward you. Always, only, and again — toward.
On Toward is the fifty-first essay in the Lateral Series — ordinary things examined until they reveal their architecture. Previous: On Again. The preposition the fiftieth lateral resolved to, traced to its root. Tōweard. *wert-. Vertere. Froward. Direction is fossilized rotation. Toward is the face, turned, and never required to arrive.