the.com/state

means The sovereign political body with authority over a territory and its people — or, more mundanely, the condition a thing happens to be in right now.

from Traces to Latin status, meaning 'manner of standing,' from stare, 'to stand.' The political sense grew out of phrases like status rei publicae — 'the standing of public affairs' — and by the medieval and early modern period 'state' had hardened into a word for the apparatus of government itself: the thing that stands, upright and permanent, while rulers and regimes come and go.