dwell
Before "dwell" meant home, it meant stuck. Old English dwellan was the verb of hindrance — to mislead, to delay, to be held up. The shift from "tarry" to "inhabit" is the shape of a delay become permanent. PIE *dheu- gives a wider cluster around being-in-the-dimness: dust, deaf, dumb, fume.
A dwelling today is a residence — the stable place a person inhabits, the address on the form. The verb didn't start as residence. Old English dwellan was a verb of hindrance: to mislead, to lead astray, to delay. Intransitively, to be held up — to tarry, to linger past the appointed moving-on. The abstract noun gedwola meant error, heresy, madness — the state of being lost in the delay. To dwell was to be stopped where you didn't mean to stop.
The shift to "inhabit" is the contraction of a long sequence: be hindered → tarry → linger → remain → stay → live in. By Middle English the older sense was already fading; by early Modern English, dwelling meant home. What got dropped along the way was the friction. The first dwellings weren't homes. They were places where the journey halted and didn't resume. Inhabitation, in the etymological reading, is a delay become permanent. Modern English keeps the older sense in one phrase: to dwell on something, to linger over it past the point of moving on. The hindrance survives as the act of returning to a thought.
Underneath sits PIE *dheu-, the wider cluster of confusion, dimness, dust, smoke. The same root branches into dust (what you raise when you stir up the air), deaf (a dimming of the ear), dumb (a dimming of speech), fume (Latin fumus, smoke). The original condition under dwell wasn't shelter; it was the swirling — being in the dust, being unclear about where you are or what to do next. A home, on this reading, is what was built when the swirling settled and the traveler stayed in the dim place long enough to call it a place.
- dwelling — a residence; what was built where the delay settled
- dwale — Middle English: nightshade, the sleep-inducing plant; from the same root — the confusion-bringer
- dust — OE dūst; same PIE root — the swirling, dimming particulate
- deaf — OE dēaf; the dimmed ear; from *dheubh-, the same family of obscured perception
- dumb — OE dumb; the dimmed speech; same family — the silence as obscuring
- fume — Latin fumus, smoke — the visible swirling; same root extended
- linger — OE lengian, "to lengthen"; different root, the same act
- tarry — Middle English tarien, "to delay"; different root, the same act