The word 'task' entered Middle English from Old North French 'tasque', meaning a duty or tax. This Old North French term derived from Medieval Latin 'tasca', a variant of 'taxa', which was a fee or charge. The Latin 'taxa' itself came from the verb 'taxare', meaning to censure, charge, or compute. The core idea of imposing a burden or a duty evolved from the concept of a levied charge. Over time, the meaning shifted from a compulsory payment to a piece of imposed work, leading to its modern sense of an assigned or undertaken duty.

The word 'task' is a simplex word of Germanic origin. It does not contain separable, productive morphemes in modern English.