drift: [13] Drift comes ultimately from the same Germanic base as produced drive, and etymologically means ‘driving or being driven’, but as far as we can tell it did not exist in Old English, and the word as we now have it is a borrowing from other Germanic languages. Its first recorded use is in the sense ‘snowdrift’, which points to Old Norse drift as the source, but later more general applications were probably reinforced by Dutch drift. => drive[drift etymology, drift origin, 英语词源]