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One etymology derives víking from the feminine vík, meaning "creek, inlet, small bay".[6] Various theories have been offered that the word viking may be derived from the name of the historical Norwegian district of Viken (or Víkin in Old Norse), meaning "a person from Viken". According to this theory, the word simply described persons from this area, and it is only in the last few centuries that it has taken on the broader sense of early medieval Scandinavians in general. However, there are a few major problems with this theory. People from the Viken area were not called 'Viking' in Old Norse manuscripts, but are referred to as víkverir (Modern Norwegian: vikvær), 'Vík dwellers'. In addition, that explanation could only explain the masculine (Old Scandinavian víkingr) and ignore the feminine (Old Norse víking), which is a serious problem because the masculine is easily derived from the feminine but hardly vice versa.[7][8][9] The form also occurs as a personal name on some Swedish rune stones. There is little indication of any negative connotation in the term before the end of the Viking Age.

Another etymology (supported by, among others, the recognized etymologist Anatoly Liberman [10]) derives viking from the same root as ON vika, f. ‘sea mile’, originally ‘the distance between two shifts of rowers’, from the root *weik or *wîk, as in the Proto-Germanic verb *wîkan, ‘to recede’. This is found in the Proto-Nordic verb *wikan, ‘to turn’, similar to Old Icelandic víkja (ýkva, víkva) ‘to move, to turn’, with well-attested nautical usages.[11] Linguistically, this theory is better attested,[11] and the term most likely predates the use of the sail by the Germanic peoples of North-Western Europe, because the Old Frisian spelling shows that the word was pronounced with a palatal k and thus in all probability existed in North-Western Germanic before that palatalization happened, that is, in the 5th century or before (in the western branch).[12][13] In that case, the idea behind it seems to be that the tired rower moves aside for the rested rower on the thwart when he relieves him. The Old Norse feminine víking (as in the phrase fara í víking) may originally have been a sea journey characterized by the shifting of rowers, i.e. a long-distance sea journey, because in the pre-sail era, the shifting of rowers would distinguish long-distance sea journeys. A víkingr (the masculine) would then originally have been a participant on a sea journey characterized by the shifting of rowers. In that case, the word Viking was not originally connected to Scandinavian seafarers but assumed this meaning when the Scandinavians begun to dominate the seas.[14]

In Old English, the word wicing appears first in the Anglo-Saxon poem, Widsith, which probably dates from the 9th century. In Old English, and in the history of the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen written by Adam of Bremen in about 1070, the term generally referred to Scandinavian pirates or raiders. As in the Old Norse usages, the term is not employed as a name for any people or culture in general. The word does not occur in any preserved Middle English texts. The word Viking was introduced into Modern English during the 18th-century Viking revival, at which point it acquired romanticised heroic overtones of "barbarian warrior" or noble savage. During the 20th century, the meaning of the term was expanded to refer not only to seaborne raiders from Scandinavia and other places settled by them (like Iceland and the Faroe Islands), but secondarily to any member of the culture that produced said raiders during the period from the late 8th to the mid-11th centuries, or more loosely from about 700 to as late as about 1100. As an adjective, the word is used to refer to ideas, phenomena, or artefacts connected with those people and their cultural life, producing expressions like Viking age, Viking culture, Viking art, Viking religion, Viking ship, and so on.[15]

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