The word angel arrives in modern English from Old English engel (with a hard g) and the Old French angele. Both of these derive from Late Latin angelus - literally messenger, which in turn was borrowed from Late Greek angelos. The word's earliest form is Mycenaean a-ke-ro, attested in Linear B syllabic script. Additionally, per Dutch linguist R. S. P. Beekes, angelos itself may be an Oriental loan, like angaros, Persian mounted courier.
The rendering of angelos is the Septuagint's default translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mal'akh, denoting simply messenger without connoting its nature. In the Latin Vulgate, this meaning becomes bifurcated: when mal'kh or angelos is supposed to denote a human messenger, words like nuntius or legatus are applied. If the word refers to some supernatural being, the word angelus appears. Such differentiation has been taken over by later vernacular translations of the Bible, early Christian and Jewish exegetes and eventually modern scholars.