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WIKTIONARY VIA KAIKKI / WIKTEXTRACT
Imported dictionary evidence
These are source reports, not reviewed *SET-U ancestry. A list of templates or numbered etymologies is not an ancestor chain. Scholarly disagreements remain in the original source text.
35,981 English word records · 45,491 etymology sections in this online subset
PARTIAL ENGLISH COVERAGE · FULL CORPUS REMAINS LOCAL2 source sections across 1 headword matching “Active”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
activeEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂eǵ- Proto-Indo-European *-eti Proto-Indo-European *h₂éǵeti Proto-Italic *agō Latin agō Proto-Indo-European *-wós Proto-Indo-European *-iHwósder. Latin -īvus ▲ Ancient Greek ἐνεργητικός (energētikós)sl. Latin āctīvuslbor. Old French actifbor. Middle English actyf English active From Middle English actyf, from Old French actif, from Latin āctīv(us), from agere (“to do, to act”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₂éǵeti. By surface analysis, act + -ive.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗activeEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂eǵ- Proto-Indo-European *-eti Proto-Indo-European *h₂éǵeti Proto-Italic *agō Latin agō Proto-Indo-European *-wós Proto-Indo-European *-iHwósder. Latin -īvus ▲ Ancient Greek ἐνεργητικός (energētikós)sl. Latin āctīvuslbor. Old French actifbor. Middle English actyf English active From Middle English actyf, from Old French actif, from Latin āctīv(us), from agere (“to do, to act”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₂éǵeti. By surface analysis, act + -ive.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗INDEPENDENT SOURCE LIBRARY
More sources for this spelling
These are spelling matches, not a claim of identical senses or agreement. Historical accounts retain their own editions and limits; none is automatically promoted into reviewed ancestry.
Browse the independently attributed sources →MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
Feind
The modern German noun for a personal, political, military, or ideological enemy or opponent. Duden derives it through Middle High German vīnt or vīant and Old High German fīand, literally the hating one; DWDS dates Old High German fīant and fījant to the eighth century and identifies the Germanic ancestor as a petrified substantivized present participle. Grimm’s dictionary independently compares Gothic fijands, Old English fēond, English fiend, Dutch vijand, and Nordic forms, while warning that its own still-deeper foam hypothesis required confirmation. The reviewed route therefore follows the inherited enemy noun to reconstructed *fi(j)and- and *fi(j)ēn-, then treats *peh₁- as proposed and stops.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗fiend
An inherited English noun whose earliest recorded sense was enemy or foe, not demon. Old English fēond belonged to a Germanic lexicalized one-who-hates formation; Middle English fẹ̄nd preserved enemy, Satan, demon, possession, and monster senses across extensive spelling variation; modern fiend continues the same English line. OED’s revised 2026 entry marks the literal enemy sense obsolete after the medieval record, explains the Devil as the ultimate Enemy, and documents long-versus-short vowel competition before the long vowel became dominant by the eighteenth century. The Middle English Dictionary independently exposes 188 quotations across eight senses without claiming a complete corpus.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗fijands
A Gothic masculine nd-stem noun conventionally glossed enemy. Project Wulfila currently exposes 26 candidates: three verified noun assignments, two further noun-only assignments, and 21 surface forms also listed under the living verb fijan. Ayora Estevan explains the collision diachronically: Proto-Germanic had already lexicalized the present-participial *fi(j)and- as enemy, while Gothic retained productive one-who-hates participles beside the noun. The five noun-only candidates use fiand, fijands, fijande, and fijandis; all five were inspected in Codex Argenteus facsimiles.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗fēogan
An Old English verb meaning hate or persecute, recorded as FEÓGAN, feógean, fiógan, contracted feón and fión, with participle feógende and a broad present-and-past paradigm. Bosworth–Toller supplies examples whose objects include crimes, evil ways, law, peace, a temple, friends, and people. The verb continues reconstructed Proto-Germanic *fi(j)ēn-. Its active-participial formation lexicalized prehistorically as the enemy noun behind Old English fēond and modern fiend, but the verb, participle, and noun are not one interchangeable category.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗fēond
An Old English enemy, foe, and Devil noun inherited from the Germanic lexicalized present-participial formation *fi(j)and-. OED’s revised 2026 entry treats fēond and fīond as dialectal Old English forms, documents i-mutated fīend and fȳnd inside the inherited nd-stem inflection, and traces the word through a highly variable Middle English record into modern fiend. Bosworth–Toller supplies the Old English paradigm and examples; the Middle English Dictionary independently reports 188 quotations across eight senses. Cotton MS Vitellius A XV folio 180v was directly inspected at Beowulf 2289, where feondes modifies fotlast, the foe’s footprint.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗hata
Old Norse hata is not only a medieval label for an inward feeling. The Dictionary of Old Norse Prose structures 101 prose citations under four active senses before its participial and reflexive branches: persecute; despise, reject, or cast aside; mock or humiliate; and hate, despise, or stand hostile toward. That ordering is a lexicographic analysis, not a chronology of semantic change. Fritzner independently begins with pursue or seek to destroy, continues through damage or destruction, and only then gives hate opposed to love. Zoëga likewise preserves poetic damage or destruction beside ordinary hate, while Cleasby and Vigfússon record active, reflexive, reciprocal, participial, and disputed poetic uses. Lexicon Poeticum displays eleven linked rows, including variants, damage, destruction, persecution, loathing, haters, and the gold-spending formula, but warns that its concordance has not been reviewed and that dates need checking. A c1200 scan of Holm perg 15 4°, folio 89v, was directly inspected against ONP's diplomatic transcription and visibly preserves hata in the line Elſcaþu hréinlife oc hata engi maɴ. All other rows remain source-reported. The generated possible runic inscriptions on modern dictionary transcriptions are excluded, and no exact historical pronunciation is invented.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗hatizōn
A Gothic weak verb meaning be angry with or at someone, represented by exactly one verified corpus token: present active second-person plural hatizoþ in John 7:23. Project Wulfila and Streitberg align the form with Greek χολᾶτε in the question “are you angry at me?” and analyze the verb with a dative object. The University of Texas derivational grammar builds class-II hatizōn on the consonantal stem hatiz- of hatis “hatred” or “wrath”; Wright independently lists it as a class-II weak verb. The macronized infinitive is a scholarly citation form, while the manuscript writes only the inflected token without a vowel-length mark. The route continues through the reviewed Germanic noun family and a qualified Indo-European comparison, then stops. One corpus token cannot establish spoken rarity, first use, a complete semantic range, exact pronunciation, or one prehistoric essence.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗sauna
The English name of a Finnish steam bath, borrowed from Finnish sauna; its deeper Finnic history is secure enough to reconstruct, while a proposed ancient Germanic source remains actively qualified.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
No reviewed record in this collection contains “active.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 5
Is *kʷē̆d- / *kʷō̆d- a securely attested prehistoric word?
No. It is a Pokorny etymon adapted in a comparative database whose pages are explicitly under active construction. Its link to hōti is a published proposal.
Is κῆδος derived from κήδω, or is the verb derived from the noun?
LSJ parenthetically links κῆδος with κήδω, whose active and middle-passive senses span distress and care, but the located entry does not fully argue one diachronic direction.
Does DDO listing hater nearby prove fjende still means hater?
No. A near-word list is lexical navigation, not identity. DDO’s definition centers active opposition, harm, or destruction and its origin field separately explains the old participle.
Does Hýmiskviða 22 preserve the active form fjá?
Yes in the reviewed normalized teaching text: sú er goð fjá. Cleasby and Fritzner independently locate the verb there.
Is hatizoþ second-person plural present indicative?
Project Wulfila analyzes it as active indicative present second-person plural. The pixels verify the form, while the grammatical label remains an editorial morphological analysis.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 5
Modern Danish kept the enemy but lost the hate verb inside its grammar.
DDO identifies fjende as historically a present participle of a verb corresponding to Old Norse fjá, to hate or persecute. Old Danish fiende then survives through a remarkable surface cloud: Fiende, Fiænde, Finde, Fînde, clipped Fiend, and both two- and three-syllable scans. The current noun no longer means that every enemy literally feels hate; it names active opposition and extends to states, ideologies, animals, weather, and abstractions. The grammatical fossil unveils a history, not a timeless essence.
The ordinary Old Norse enemy outlived the finite hate verb behind it.
ONP classifies fjá as poetic and exposes no prose citations. Cleasby, Fritzner, and Lexicon Poeticum converge on three Eddic contexts, while normalized texts preserve active fjá, finite fíár, and reflexive fiásk. Cleasby then points to fjándi as the participial relative that remained across Germanic. ONP gives that separate enemy noun 222 prose citations and a large semantic range. The two corpus totals are not directly frequency-comparable, and neither proves an exact extinction event; together they reveal the asymmetry between a tiny finite-verb record and the prolific lexicalized enemy branch.
Old Norse hate was action, contempt, humiliation, and feeling inside one verb.
ONP's 101-citation prose article orders four active senses before its participial and reciprocal branches: persecute; despise, reject, or cast aside; mock or humiliate; and hate, despise, or stand hostile. Fritzner independently moves from pursuit and destruction to ordinary hate. A c1200 manuscript leaf visibly writes hata in a command to love chastity and hate no person. The article's sense order is not a chronology, and the poetic concordance is explicitly unreviewed; the reveal is the documented semantic range, not an invented first essence.
The verb disappeared from ordinary English; its prehistoric hater survived as fiend.
Old English fēogan meant hate or persecute and had a productive paradigm including feógende. The Germanic active-participial formation had already lexicalized as an enemy noun before the recorded branches. English therefore preserves the family most visibly not in its ordinary verb hate, but in fēond and modern fiend.
A cognate can strengthen a reconstruction without proving it.
Armenian ստոյգ “true, real” is one reason the Greek *set-u- analysis is attractive; its own preform and the exact common morphology remain reconstructed.
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SOURCES
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FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
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