tempt

The root tempt comes from Latin temptāre (also spelled tentāre), which originally meant something very physical: to feel, to touch, to handle. Before it had anything to do with morality or desire, temptāre was what you did with your hands — you reached out and felt an object to find out what it was like. From that hands-on probing came a cluster of related ideas: to test, to try, to put something to the proof.

That single image — reaching out to test something — splits into two very different family branches in English.

Branch one: testing turns into luring. If you keep "testing" a person — poking at their willpower, dangling something in front of them to see if they will reach for it — you are no longer neutrally probing; you are tempting them. So tempt drifted from "test" to "entice, lure toward something (often wrong)." The noun temptation is the pull itself — the thing reaching out to grab you. The adjective tempting describes whatever does the pulling: a tempting offer is one that keeps testing your resolve.

Branch two: testing stays neutral. Add the prefix ad- (toward) to temptāre and you get attemptāre → attempt: to try at something, to make a test-run toward a goal. Here the "lure" sense never developed; an attempt is just an effort, a try. The Latin tentāre spelling gives us tentative — literally "done as a test, by way of trying" — hence hesitant, provisional, not yet final: a tentative plan is a trial plan. And tentāre's "feel/touch" sense survives almost literally in tentacle, from Latin tentāculum, a "feeler" — the limb an octopus uses to touch and probe the world.

Notice the spelling clue: words about enticing keep the tempt spelling (tempt, temptation, tempting), while the older feel/test meanings often surface in the tent form (tentative, tentacle). Same Latin verb, two doors: one leads to the seduction of the senses, the other back to the literal sense of touch.