'apodosis' originates from Late Latin 'apodosis', ultimately borrowed from Greek 'apodosis' (ἀπόδοσις), where the prefix 'apo-' meant 'away/from' and the root related to 'dosis' (from the verb meaning 'to give') meant 'a giving/return'.

'apodosis' was used in Medieval and Late Latin with senses such as 'a giving back' or 'recompense' and was later adopted into grammatical terminology (via scholarly Latin) to denote the consequent clause of a conditional sentence, becoming the English term 'apodosis'.

Initially it referred to 'a giving back' or 'recompense' in Greek and Latin, but in grammatical usage it came to mean 'the part of a conditional sentence expressing the consequence', a shift from a general notion of 'giving/return' to a specialized grammatical sense.