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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 LOCAL1 source section across 1 headword matching “But”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
butEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
From Middle English but, buten, boute, bouten, from Old English būtan (“without, outside of, except, only”), from Proto-West Germanic *biūtan, *biūtini, equivalent to be- + out. Cognate with Scots but, bot (“outside, without, but”), Saterland Frisian buute (“without”), West Frisian bûten (“outside of, apart from, other than, except, but”), Dutch buiten (“outside”), Dutch Low Saxon buten (“outside”), German Low German buuten, buute (“outside”), obsolete German baußen (“outside”), Luxembourgish baussen. Compare bin, about.
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.
Chambers (1908)
1908- ButEnglish · e-37683-3765
But, but, prep. or conj. without: except: besides: only: yet: still.—Used as a noun for a verbal objection; also as a verb, as in Scott's 'but me no buts.'—adj. (Scot.) outside, as in 'but end.'—But and ben, a house havi
Read the full source record → - ButEnglish · e-37683-3766
But, but, n. Same as Butt.
Read the full source record →
0112
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
German masculine nouncontrarian claim
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 ↗nouncontrarian claim
aguacate
The Spanish word for the avocado tree and fruit, borrowed from Nahuatl āhuacatl, whose historical records include both fruit and testicle senses.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
alpaca
An English animal and fiber word borrowed through Spanish from Aymara allpaqa / allphaqa.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
bayou
English bayou, recorded by 1763, came from Louisiana French bayouque. An early Choctaw *bayok is a plausible proposed source, but the historical form and its alleged contraction to modern bók are not securely attested.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noun · verbdossier summary
boomerang
An Aboriginal Australian borrowing recorded in English by 1824. Dharug and Dharawal forms have been proposed, but the Australian National Dictionary Centre says the exact source language remains uncertain.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
boy
A male child or young man; Middle English also used the word for a male servant or churl, and its origin remains disputed.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Middle Irish noundossier summary
cais
eDIL separates two Irish headwords written cais. The first, also recorded as caise, is explicitly explained both as love and as hate; its cited passages and glossary equations range from searc and grádh "love" to miscais and mioscais "hatred", with context deciding individual readings. One Éigse line is tentatively translated so that the same visible form occurs on both sides: "my love ... is met by hatred(?)". The question mark matters. The second eDIL headword cais means "eye" and is excluded from this semantic lineage. These records establish a remarkable lexicographic opposition, not one timeless essence, a chronology from love to hate, or proof that every occurrence belongs to one historically indivisible sense. John T. Koch compares the noun with Proto-Celtic *katsi- < *kad-t/si- and a wider *kad- family, but that ancestry and its proposed Germanic comparison remain open. eDIL itself generally supplies etymologies only selectively. No manuscript pixels were directly inspected, no earliest-use or historical-frequency claim is made, and no exact pronunciation is invented.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
chai
In current English, a South Asian-style tea commonly prepared with milk and spices; the word belongs to the overland cha/chay transmission family ultimately derived from Chinese 茶.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verb · nouncontrarian claim
checkmate
An inescapable chess defeat and, figuratively, complete thwarting; a compound transmitted through French, Arabic, and Persian chess language.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
chá
The Portuguese word for tea, a European cha-type form associated with sixteenth-century Portuguese contact through Macao rather than the Dutch te-type route.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noun and adjectivehistorical form
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 ↗023
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
●
Medieval Latin / Indo-European
-ātim
distributive adverb-forming suffix
- DATE
- Medieval Latin
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 0
Middle English / Indo-European
deie
woman in charge of milking and making butter and cheese
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Middle English / Indo-European
deierie
a place where milk, butter, and cheese are handled
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
0324
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
openprobableposition text
Did -rīx mean exactly “king” in every compound name?
Not necessarily. The king or prince value is secure for the element, but scholarship distinguishes names where it is determinative from analyses in which it is semantically bleached or intensifying. Each host therefore requires its own compositional claim.
openprobableposition text
Can the lexicalization of one who hates as enemy be dated to one exact event?
No unique event is known. Cross-branch evidence places it before the recorded daughter languages, but no text records the prehistoric lexicalization moment.
openprobableposition text
Can the exact Proto-Germanic pronunciation and paradigm be recovered?
Not completely. Comparative forms support the morphology, but no recording or written Proto-Germanic paradigm survives.
openproposedposition text
Does Freund securely descend from exactly *prī-?
The comparison is published on the shared friend-family route but remains proposed and less secure than the Germanic formation.
openprobableposition text
Was the relative sense inherited or independently strengthened in Germanic branches?
The sources establish the sense across German and Nordic evidence but do not recover one complete prehistoric semantic tree.
openprobableposition text
Does Hass securely descend from *ḱeh₂d-?
Only as a qualified proposal. Formal correspondence is published, but the semantic chain through grief, care, pain, pursuit, and hatred is not transparent.
openproposedposition text
Do Celtic cais and Greek κῆδος prove that love and hate share one root?
No. They belong to a disputed wider comparison. Middle Irish cais carries a striking love-and-hatred field, but that does not make German Liebe an ancestor or cognate of Hass.
openboundaryposition text
Can aguacate be securely pushed deeper than āhuacatl?
Not from the reviewed sources. The institutional dictionaries reach the Nahuatl word and its historical witnesses but do not establish a deeper lexical ancestor.
openproposedposition text
Is Choctaw bayuk a securely attested source of bayou?
No. An early Choctaw *bayok is plausible and accepted in a major handbook, but later bayuk is not securely attested and contraction to bók was conjectural.
openproposedposition text
Which Aboriginal language supplied boomerang?
Dharug bumarin and a Dharawal bou-mar-rang form are published candidates, but the Australian National Dictionary Centre says the exact source language remains uncertain.
openprobableposition text
What securely precedes Old English brȳd?
The sources publish broad Germanic comparanda, including Old High German brūt, but this dossier does not yet have a reviewed source that warrants one reconstructed parent.
openproposedposition text
Are the opposite readings one polysemous word, merged historical homonyms, or a lexicographic convenience?
eDIL groups them in one headword but does not, by that editorial act alone, settle the full historical relationship among every love and hate occurrence.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
RANK 2GRADE Aranked reveal
Truth began with firmness and fidelity.
Before truth centered factual correspondence, its family named what was firm, faithful, and steadfast.
RANK 9GRADE Aranked reveal
The most repeated origin story is not the most rigorous answer.
Mapuche ancestry is a serious, evidenced proposal—but current RAE and a historical Spanish argument keep the deeper source genuinely open.
RANK 19GRADE Aranked reveal
The x of rēx is a whole nominative sound change in one letter.
Latin starts from the bound stem rēg-, adds nominative -s, devoices g to k, and writes the resulting /ks/ as x. Genitive rēgis makes the stem visible—but it is a sibling case form, not an ancestor.
RANK 32GRADE Acontrarian claim
Enemy is a fossilized hater—but 21 Gothic tokens still refuse to choose.
Project Wulfila lists 42 candidates under fijan and 26 under the enemy noun fijands. Their intersection is exactly 21 surface tokens. Ayora Estevan explains the collision: *fi(j)and- had lexicalized as enemy before Gothic, while Gothic still possessed the productive present participle one who hates. Case and syntax resolve some passages; the remaining 21 stay public as noun-versus-participle ambiguity.
RANK 33GRADE Acontrarian claim
Enemy is a fossilized hater—but lexicalization does not make every token transparent.
Project Wulfila lists 26 candidates under the Gothic enemy noun and 42 under the verb fijan; exactly 21 surface tokens belong to both inventories. Ayora Estevan explains why: Proto-Germanic had already lexicalized one who hates as enemy, while Gothic retained the productive participle. The five noun-only tokens are directly inspected; the 21-token overlap remains public instead of being counted twice as certainty.
RANK 37GRADE Aranked reveal
Swedish fiende is not built from modern hata.
SO says fiende originally meant hatande. SAOB and Hellquist make the hidden grammar explicit: the enemy noun is a lexicalized present participle of the Germanic fi(j)- verb, literally one who hates. But SAOB’s separate hata article places the modern Swedish hate verb in the hat- family. Swedish therefore carries two different Germanic hate histories side by side: one fossilized inside the everyday noun enemy, the other alive as the everyday verb hata.
RANK 38GRADE Acontrarian claim
Old High German fīant was already a noun—but in fixed phrases its old participial character could still shine through.
AWB calls fîant / fîjant a strong masculine noun, then isolates fixed formulas where its old participial character can still shine through. Fîant uuesan could mean be hostile, hate someone, or wish someone ill; fîant mahhôn meant make hostile; zi fîante tuon could mean regard as an enemy or hate. Beside it, AWB records the live weak verb fîên, to hate, in eighth- and ninth-century Alemannic manuscripts. The word is therefore more revealing than a simple literal gloss: it is a lexicalized noun whose older verbal architecture remained locally visible in syntax.
RANK 40GRADE Acontrarian claim
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.
RANK 41GRADE Aranked reveal
The enemy fossil and the living hate verb coexisted in Old High German.
AWB records fîên as a weak verb only in eighth- and ninth-century Alemannic manuscripts, but the pocket preserves an infinitive, present participle, preterite, and past participle across hate, hostility, detestation, and rejection. Beside it, fîant was already a strong masculine enemy noun whose old participial character could still shine through in fixed phrases. Old High German therefore preserves both sides of the history at once: the live verbal family and the noun already lexicalized from it. The evidence reveals a grammatical relationship, not the psychology of every enemy and not a securely recovered Proto-Indo-European essence.
RANK 44GRADE Aranked reveal
One corpus hit written hatia is not the hate verb at all.
The May 2026 Corpus Oudfries search returns six records under word or lemma hatia, but spelling alone creates a trap. In Brokmer B 101, Buma explicitly identifies hatia as atia "rear" with prothetic h; Nijdam's translation confirms a poor mother unable to feed her children. That token is excluded from the hate lineage. The five relevant records then reveal the genuine verb's own range: harm or hindrance on an army road, legal adversity, and God hating perjury, lying speech, and false witnesses. The contrarian truth is therefore philological twice over: one identical surface belongs elsewhere, while the inherited verb itself extends beyond private feeling.
RANK 46GRADE Aranked reveal
Old High German hazzōn is a paradigm fault line, not proof that hate originally meant pursue.
The clean dictionary headword conceals paired ēn and ōn forms: Starling reports hazzēn in the eighth century and hazzōn in the ninth, Duden prints haʒʒēn and haʒʒōn, and the UT reflex index also records hazēn and hazōn. Corpus-wide research confirms that Old High German ēn verbs can show ōn double forms. DWB reports aemulari and insequi alignments that support emulation, following, or hostile pursuit—but Pokorny’s comparative warning is exact: Germanic evidence does not prove that pursue was the root’s basic meaning. The normalized form, the source-reported tokens, the paradigm analysis, and the prehistoric semantic claim are four different evidence layers.
RANK 48GRADE Aranked reveal
Old Saxon hate crosses from verb into enemy noun inside one manuscript locus.
Köbler assigns hatōn four cited loci, but the evidence is not four neat tokens. Heliand 1451 alone varies between Munich hatan and Cotton haton. At Heliand 4915, Munich hatandiero and Cotton hettendero are indexed twice: under the verb as present-participial forms and under hėttiand as the lexicalized agent noun enemy. The Munich hatan and hatandiero pixels are directly inspected. The reveal is therefore grammatical, not mystical: one written formation sits at the boundary between haters and enemies. It does not prove that every enemy hates, that pursue was the first meaning, or that the four-locus dictionary count represents four manuscripts.
044
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
scholarly reference15 CLAIM LINKS
Chess
Bo Utas and Encyclopaedia Iranica contributors / 1991
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗pronunciation reference5 CLAIM LINKS
WikiWoordenboek — vriend pronunciation and syllabification
WikiWoordenboek contributors
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗pronunciation reference2 CLAIM LINKS
WikiWoordenboek — vijand pronunciation and syllabification
WikiWoordenboek contributors
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary1 CLAIM LINKS
Rí — Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language
Gregory Toner, Sharon Arbuthnot, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Marie-Luise Theuerkauf, and Dagmar Wodtko / 2019
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗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.