'apabhramsa' originates from Sanskrit, specifically the word 'apabhraṃśa', where 'apa-' meant 'away, off' and 'bhraṃśa' meant 'broken, corrupted'.

'apabhraṃśa' was used in later Sanskrit and Prakrit texts to describe speech that had 'fallen away'; the term then became the label for a set of Middle Indo-Aryan vernaculars and the literature composed in them, eventually entering English as 'apabhramsa'.

Initially, it meant 'fallen away' or 'corrupted'; over time it shifted from a general pejorative descriptor to a technical term denoting specific late Middle Indo-Aryan vernaculars and their literary corpora.