GRAPH-WIDE SEARCH
MEASURE THE GRAPH ↗NOT JUST A DICTIONARY LOOKUP
6 EVIDENCE COLLECTIONSSEARCH
THE GRAPH.
Find a modern word—or search sideways through reconstructed roots, historical forms, meanings, languages, scholars, sources, claims, disputes, and witnesses.
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 “Begin”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
beginEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
From Middle English beginnen, from Old English beginnan (“to begin”), from Proto-West Germanic *biginnan, from Proto-Germanic *biginnaną (“to begin”), from be- + base verb *ginnaną also found in Old English onginnan.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗beginEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
From Middle English beginnen, from Old English beginnan (“to begin”), from Proto-West Germanic *biginnan, from Proto-Germanic *biginnaną (“to begin”), from be- + base verb *ginnaną also found in Old English onginnan.
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 →0112
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
nouncontrarian claim
algorithm
A finite or stepwise procedure, descended through medieval arithmetic vocabulary from the Latinized name of al-Khwārizmī.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗adjectivecontrarian claim
candid
Open or frank in modern English, inherited through French and Latin from a family of brightness and whiteness.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verb · noundossier summary
check
To verify, restrain, mark, or issue a bank draft today; a word whose oldest English history begins with a threatened king in chess.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noun and adjectivecontrarian claim
dairy
Milk, milk products, or a place and enterprise devoted to them; historically built on the occupational word for a woman managing milk and food production.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verbcontrarian claim
decimate
To destroy or reduce drastically; borrowed from a Latin verb built on “tenth” and first used in English for killing every tenth member of a group.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
dime
The United States ten-cent coin, named with an older English and French word for a tenth part or tithe.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verbcontrarian claim
feign
To invent, fabricate, make a likeness, or pretend; borrowed through Anglo-French from Latin fingere, to shape or fashion.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old English strong masculine nd-agent nouncontrarian claim
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 ↗Old Norse weak verbdossier summary
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 ↗nouncontrarian claim
humility
Freedom from pride or arrogance; the quality or condition of being humble.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noun · adjectivecontrarian claim
kind
An inherited English word whose noun history runs through nature, birth, class, and family while its adjective history runs through what is natural, native, fitting, and only later benevolent.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noun · verbcontrarian claim
love
Deep affection; an unusually durable Germanic word whose emotional core survived more than a millennium of sound change.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗020
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
No reviewed record in this collection contains “begin.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
0318
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
openprobableposition text
Does the English record begin in the 13th or 14th century?
The reviewed reports differ. Etymonline gives an early-thirteenth-century algorism; Merriam-Webster gives a fourteenth-century first-known-use horizon.
openprobableposition text
Does the English record begin in the 13th or 15th century?
The reviewed source reports differ. Etymonline gives mid-thirteenth-century arsmetike; Merriam-Webster gives a fifteenth-century first-known-use horizon.
openprobableposition text
Does the English record begin in 1588 or the 1590s?
The reports differ slightly: Merriam-Webster gives 1588 and Etymonline gives the 1590s. Neither date proves the word was coined then.
openprobableposition text
Does the specialist title begin in 1604 or the 1630s?
Merriam-Webster reports 1604; Etymonline reports the 1630s. These are different source horizons, not necessarily irreconcilable claims about the same underlying object.
openprobableposition text
Is Habakkuk-gloss dfiunt a secure Devil token?
No. AWB says the d likely begins diuuil and treats dfiunt as probably corrupt; the Epinal form dfiant does not remove the uncertainty.
openprobableposition text
Does the English record begin in the 1570s or in 1572?
Merriam-Webster reports 1572; Etymonline reports the 1570s. The exact year fits within the broader decade but remains a source-reported horizon.
openprobableposition text
When does the reviewed English record for legislation begin?
The references disagree. Merriam-Webster reports 1606; Etymonline gives the 1650s, while CNRTL cites NED for before 1655. The earliest reviewed year remains source-reported rather than object-verified.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Why does the twelfth month mean tenth?
The Latin name belongs to an early Roman year beginning in March, when December occupied the tenth position. Calendar reform changed the position while the name persisted.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Did boy begin as the ordinary word for a male child?
Not exclusively. American Heritage records Middle English boi as male servant, churl, and young male.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Was a calculator originally a machine?
No. The reviewed English history begins with Middle English calkelatour, a person who counted or computed; the machine inherits that human agent label.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Did check begin with verification?
No. The oldest sequence starts with chess, then stop and restraint; verification and banking are later semantic branches.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Is figurative checkmate a late metaphor?
Not entirely. Merriam-Webster reports Middle English chekmaten with both chess and frustrate senses.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 6
RANK 3GRADE Aranked reveal
Robot named forced labor before machinery.
The machine word begins in Czech robota: compulsory labor, corvée, or drudgery.
RANK 22GRADE Acontrarian claim
Kind is not kin with a d—and kindness did not begin as niceness.
Kind and kin descend through separate Germanic formations and meet only at the deeper birth root. The adjective first carries natural, native, fitting, and proper senses; benevolence becomes prominent through later semantic development.
RANK 91GRADE Aranked reveal
A hospital was hospitality before medicine.
The English record begins with lodging and charitable shelter. The medical institution developed inside an older guest-care family rather than naming medicine from the start.
RANK 132GRADE Acontrarian claim
Dairy begins with a woman, then a baker, then dough.
The milk-production place is formed on deie, a woman managing milk, continuing Old English dǣge, female baker or servant, in the dough and shaping family.
RANK 144GRADE Aranked reveal
Emotion first moved crowds before it named inner feeling.
English emotion begins in disturbance, agitation, and social movement; strong feeling emerges later from the same movement-out family.
RANK 159GRADE Acontrarian claim
It did not begin as merely “forbidden.”
Tongan and reconstructed Oceanic evidence joins prohibition and ritual restriction with sacredness and consecration.
040
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “begin.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
051
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
06
SEARCH IS DISCOVERY, NOT PROOF
EVERY RESULT OPENS A PERMANENT EVIDENCE RECORD.
Matching text only locates a record. It does not raise confidence, settle a dispute, establish cognacy, or turn a source report into direct inspection. Follow the result into its citations and editorial limits.