A woman from Athlone, who doesn't want to be named, wrote to me recently asking about what she considered to be the ignorant way in which the word ax, as used in phrases such as he axed me out, have survived all the attempts of schooling to eradicate it.
Well, although ax is now considered a vulgarism everywhere, thank goodness for the word's survival, because it has as long a pedigree as ask, and is still in constant use all over the English-speaking world.
"I am often axed to tell it, sir", says a character from Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of South Ireland, back in 1862. Twenty years later, Tennyson, in one of his sometimes comical adventures in the field of dialect poetry, wrote this as an example of Lincolnshire speech: "Summun `ed hax'd fur a son, an' `e promised a son to she.'
`Axe, and it shalbe geven you", was Tindale's 1526 translation of Matthew, Vll, 7. "How sholde I axen mercy of Tisbe?" axed Chaucer in The Legend of Good Women. Wyclif in 1388 wrote "Whanne he schal axe, what shal Y answere to hym", in his translation of Job. A long and distinguished pedigree, indeed, ax comes from Old English acsian (axian) to ask.
Down to about 1600, ax, found mostly in southern England, was the common literary form; thereafter the northern ask, from the Old English form ascian, began to replace it. The Teutonic word had a pedigree dating back to Sanskrit, which has ish, to seek.
The phrase to ask the banns is found in Middle English,; it survives in southern England. It means to publish the banns of marriage. "Aske the bannes thre halydawes. Then let hym come and wytnes bring To stonde bye at here weddynge" is found in a tract dated 1450. Up to recent days to be out-axed in Kent meant to have your marriage banns called out for the last time.
Unrelated asks: in part of Scotland an ask is the stake to which a cow is tethered in the cow-house. From Old Norse askr, the ash. Ask is also applied to things made of ash, such as wooden dishes in Shetland and Orkney (in Norse myth Ask was the first man, created by God from an ash-tree). And P.J. McCall, author of Boolavogue; heard ask, a newt, in Carlow. From Old English athexe, a lizard, this.