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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 2 headwords matching “Arab”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
ArabEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
Borrowed from Arabic عَرَب (ʕarab, “Arabs”) or back-formation from Arabic.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗arabEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
Borrowed from Hindi अरब (arab).
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 →016
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
nouncontrarian claim
algebra
A mathematical discipline whose English name travels through Medieval Latin from Arabic al-jabr, restoration or completion.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noundossier summary
algorism
The older English word for calculation with Hindu-Arabic numerals, transmitted through French and Medieval Latin from the name al-Khwārizmī.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounhistorical form
algorithm
A finite or stepwise procedure, descended through medieval arithmetic vocabulary from the Latinized name of al-Khwārizmī.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verb · noundossier summary
checkmate
An inescapable chess defeat and, figuratively, complete thwarting; a compound transmitted through French, Arabic, and Persian chess language.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noundossier summary
chess
The board game whose English name arrives through French chess vocabulary, with competing scholarly accounts of the deeper Persian and Arabic route.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Norse verbdossier summary
fjá
Old Norse fjá was a verb meaning to hate. The Dictionary of Old Norse Prose classifies it as poetic and exposes zero prose citations; its glossarium links point to the early form fía and the reconstructed Proto-Germanic *fi(j)ēn-. Cleasby and Vigfússon call the verb obsolete, compare Gothic fijan and Old English feon or fjan, and locate it in Hýmiskviða 22 and Lokasenna 35, with the reflexive fjásk in Skírnismál 33. Fritzner independently gives the same three locations. The normalized verse texts preserve three different grammatical surfaces: goð fjá in Hýmiskviða, mangi fíár in Lokasenna, and Freyr fiásk in Skírnismál. Lexicon Poeticum likewise reports three poetic records, but explicitly warns that its concordance is unreviewed and that dates should be checked. These are source-reported lexical and edited-text records, not directly inspected manuscript objects, and three records in the reviewed poetic concordance are not a census of every Old Norse utterance. The finite verb became a tiny poetic fossil while its inherited participial relative fjándi became the ordinary enemy noun and accumulated 222 citations in ONP's prose corpus. Those corpus totals are not directly frequency-comparable, but the contrast makes the grammatical survival visible. The generated possible runic inscription shown by modern dictionary transcriptions is not historical evidence and is excluded. No historical sound recording exists, so the dossier does not fabricate one exact pronunciation.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗0211
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
●
Classical Arabic / Afro-Asiatic
Khwārizm
Khwārizm, a region south of the Aral Sea
- DATE
- early medieval and older geographic record
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 2
Classical Arabic / Afro-Asiatic
al-Khwārizmī
the Khwārizmian; name of Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī
- DATE
- 9th century
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 2
Classical Arabic / Afro-Asiatic
al-jabr
restoration, completion; an operation in equation solving
- DATE
- 9th century
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Classical Arabic / Afro-Asiatic
al-šaṭranj
chess
- DATE
- early Islamic Arabic
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 0
Present-Day English / Indo-European
algorism
calculation with Hindu-Arabic numerals; an arithmetic rule or procedure
- DATE
- early 13th century–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Old French / Indo-European
algorisme / augorisme
the art of reckoning with Hindu-Arabic numerals
- DATE
- Old French, 12th–14th centuries
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Middle English / Indo-European
algorisme / augrim
arithmetic using Hindu-Arabic numerals
- DATE
- 14th–15th centuries
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 2
Medieval Latin / Indo-European
algorismus
arithmetic; computation with Hindu-Arabic numerals
- DATE
- 12th–15th centuries
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 2
Classical Arabic / Afro-Asiatic
jabara
to restore, reunite, set or mend
- DATE
- Classical Arabic
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Classical Arabic / Afro-Asiatic
māt
checkmated; alternatively interpreted as “has died”
- DATE
- Arabic chess vocabulary
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Classical Arabic / Afro-Asiatic
šāh
shāhking; the king in chess
- DATE
- early Islamic chess vocabulary
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 2
0310
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 7
openprobableposition text
Did Arabic šāh pass directly into French?
The Arabic source is well supported, but Merriam-Webster leaves direct borrowing versus mediation through Spanish jaque unresolved.
openprobableposition text
Does checkmate literally mean the king is dead?
That is a longstanding Arabic analysis, but Merriam-Webster and Encyclopaedia Iranica favor a Persian loan meaning left, helpless, broken, or paralyzed.
openproposedposition text
Does chess descend through šāh or through šatranj?
Merriam-Webster routes the French forms through the king-call šāh; Encyclopaedia Iranica groups English chess with descendants of the Indian-Persian-Arabic game-name caturaṅga / čatrang / šatranj.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Is the bone-setting sense a fake folk story?
No. Arabic and Romance transmission includes reunion of broken parts and bone-setting. That real medical sense should not be confused with the mathematical title history.
resolvedprobableposition text
Is algorithm originally a Greek mathematical word?
No. The lexical line reaches the Arabic name al-Khwārizmī through Medieval Latin. Greek arithmos likely influenced the later spelling, but it is not the source of the name.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Are humus, soil, and hummus, chickpea paste, the same word?
No. American Heritage separates Latin humus, soil, from the Arabic and possibly Aramaic food word hummus.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Did the English word shah produce check?
No. English shah and English check are cousins: both reach back independently to Persian šāh, while check travels through chess, Arabic, and French.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 3
RANK 42GRADE Aranked reveal
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.
RANK 175GRADE Aranked reveal
Algebra named restoration before it named symbols.
Arabic al-jabr was an operation of restoring or completing an equation—and also had a real bone-setting history.
RANK 181GRADE A-ranked reveal
The king is not securely dead.
The familiar “shāh māt = the king died” translation matches Arabic morphology, but the better-supported historical analysis treats māt as a Persian loan meaning helpless, broken, or at a loss.
040
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “arab.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
052
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
SOURCE REPORTEDlexicographic first use
Merriam-Webster source-reported English record
algorism / algorism / 14th century
Algorism — Word Historywitness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Old High German Tatian, weeds parable
fīant / fīant / ninth-century Old High German Tatian; edited text
Tatian: Lateinisch und altdeutsch mit ausführlichem Glossar, 2nd ed. — section 72, p. 96reporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗06
SEARCH IS DISCOVERY, NOT PROOF
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