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 LOCALNo exact match for “Differ” in this partial English subset. That does not mean the full research corpus—or linguistic scholarship—has no record. Check the original dictionary entry ↗
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 →Differ
No extractable etymology was found for this exact spelling. Open the original dictionary entry ↗
Read the complete entry and references ↗ · Contribute a cited dossier
0112
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
German masculine nouncontrarian claim
Freund
German Freund continues Middle High German vriunt and Old High German friunt. DWDS/Pfeifer, Duden, and Grimm independently analyze the inherited Germanic formation as a substantivized present participle of the verb represented by Gothic frijōn and Old English frēogan: historically a loving or favorably disposed one. The record is semantically wider than a modern close companion: the historical dictionaries also document neighbor, relative, lover, ally, supporter, patron, address, and euphemistic uses. The graph joins the High German line to the same reviewed *frijōnd- and *frī- nodes as English friend, keeps *prī- proposed, and stops.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
Liebe
The German noun for love, inherited through Middle and Old High German and a Germanic abstract-noun formation distinct from the immediate noun ancestry of English love.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
alpaca
An English animal and fiber word borrowed through Spanish from Aymara allpaqa / allphaqa.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noun · adjectivecontrarian claim
arithmetic
The art or practice of counting and calculation; transmitted from Greek arithmos “number” through Latin and French.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
dough
A kneadable flour mixture; inherited from Old English dāg through a Germanic formation on the Indo-European form-and-build root.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗adjectivedossier summary
etymological
Of, relating to, or based on etymology; an Early Modern English adjective whose exact formation is described differently by major historical dictionaries.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noun and adjectivecontrarian claim
female
A sex-class term borrowed through French from Latin fēmella, a diminutive of fēmina, with its English spelling later remodeled under male.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noun and verbcontrarian claim
figure
A shape, representation, symbol, number, person, or act of calculation; borrowed through French from Latin figūra, form or shape.
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 ↗Gothic class-I weak-verb lemmacontrarian claim
hatjan
A Gothic weak verb meaning hate, represented by exactly one verified corpus token: the present participle hatjandam in Matthew 5:44. Project Wulfila lemmatizes that token as class-I hatjan, while the parallel Luke 6:27 command uses class-III hatandans from hatan. Braune treats the two shapes as conjugational fluctuation; Orel and the current corpus keep distinct formations visible. The normalized infinitive, the written participle, and the reconstructed parent are therefore never collapsed.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
hotel
A public lodging establishment, borrowed from French hôtel through Old French hostel and ultimately the Latin hospitality family.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
lady
A woman of rank or a polite term for a woman; historically from an Old English household compound joining loaf with a kneading element.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗020
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
No reviewed record in this collection contains “differ.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
0324
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.
openproposedposition text
Is the deepest counting root *h₂rei- or *erei-dhmo- from *re-?
The references use different levels and notations: Merriam-Webster derives the Greek base through *h₂rei-, while Etymonline prints an expanded *erei-dhmo- formation tied to *re-.
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.
openproposedposition text
Is *set-u- certain?
No. It is a serious published reconstruction, but the exact morphology and wider family are analyzed differently by scholars.
openproposedposition text
Does fiende securely descend from exactly *peh₁-?
Only as a qualified modern proposal. Kroonen publishes the route; Hellquist records a historically different deeper comparison, and neither recovers a written ancestral token or unique original semantic scene.
openprobableposition text
Are hatan and hatjan two Gothic verbs or one fluctuating paradigm?
The sources preserve different analytical levels. Project Wulfila gives separate class-III and class-I lemmas; Orel publishes distinct comparative formations. Braune says hatan fluctuates with class-I hatjan, while Sturtevant proposes a specifically Gothic secondary explanation.
openprobableposition text
Why does Köbler print hatia with an asterisk while corpus forms are visible?
Köbler's sigla mark inferred or unattested representations inside his lexicographic system, while the later corpus surfaces inflected forms hatijen, hatie, hata, and hatien and one misleading hatia homograph. The exact source-base difference remains to be reconciled.
openprobableposition text
Is *hatiz- the one exact spoken Proto-Germanic parent?
It is the atlas's reviewed cross-source representation, not a recording. Köbler prints *hati-, *hatiz, Koch gives *hataz ~ *hatiz-, and Pfeifer's stem-class description differs.
openprobableposition text
Is hettende a verbal participle or a lexical noun meaning enemy?
The evidence supports both analyses in different editorial systems. Tío Sáenz lemmatizes hettende under hettan; Clark Hall calls it a participle of hatian; Bosworth–Toller lists hettende among the forms of the masculine noun hettend, “enemy.”
openprobableposition text
Is the immediate Latin form Medieval Latin or New Latin?
The references differ. American Heritage labels omnisciēns Medieval Latin; Merriam-Webster labels the immediate form New Latin and analyzes it as a back-formation from Medieval Latin omniscientia.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
RANK 10GRADE Aranked reveal
Andean neighbors need not be linguistic cousins.
Alpaca comes from Aymara while llama comes from Quechua: the words travel through Spanish from different families.
RANK 12GRADE Aranked reveal
A Turkish word is not proof of who invented the food.
English yogurt is Turkish yoğurt, probably related to yoğur- “knead”; the origin of fermented milk is a different historical question.
RANK 20GRADE Aranked reveal
King is a kin-word, not a royal word.
English king continues Old English cyning and Germanic *kuninga-, built on the kin or lineage base *kunja-. Latin rēx, royal, and regal belong to a different root—and even “leader of the kin” overstates the disputed original Germanic sense.
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 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 50GRADE Aranked reveal
The hostile adjective may belong to whet and threat, not hate—and its starred lemma still has a nominative.
Köbler's Old Saxon entry reports five written readings at three Heliand loci, including nominative hotie, huotia, and huoti, yet heads the entry hōti*. The asterisk therefore cannot be explained away as “no nominative survives.” More radically, the sources split at the root. UT groups hōti with hatōn and heti under the inherited hate etymon k̑ād-. Köbler's same entry cross-references hatōn but reconstructs a different *hwōtja- adjective beside *hwōtō “threat” and Pokorny's *kʷē̆d- / *kʷō̆d- family of boring, pricking, sharpening, whetting, and inciting. Munich hotie and hotean are directly visible in contexts of hostile minds and hostile intent; Cotton huotia, huotian, and huoti remain source-reported. The unveiling is not “hostility secretly means sharpened hate.” It is that rigorous etymology sometimes reveals two irreconcilable maps where a flat dictionary would print one arrow.
RANK 52GRADE Aranked reveal
Friend and fiend are grammatical twins—but not cognates.
OED analyzes friend as a noun use of the present participle behind the Germanic free and love family, and it explicitly calls fiend a similar formation. Bosworth–Toller makes the Old English structure visible: freónd is the loving participle of freón, to free or love. The enemy word follows a different hate verb. The real unveiling is structural: one inherited agent noun is the loving one, the other the hating one or enemy, and parallel grammar must not be mistaken for one root splitting into moral opposites.
RANK 53GRADE Aranked reveal
Freund fossilizes the loving one—but it does not come from Freude.
Pfeifer, Duden, and Grimm route Freund through Middle High German vriunt and Old High German friunt to a substantivized Germanic present participle of the love verb. Grimm also makes the structural contrast explicit: Feind is built on a different hate verb. The unveiling is grammatical rather than mystical—Freund and Feind look like a moral pair because both preserve agent-noun architecture, not because one ancient root split into love and hate.
RANK 54GRADE Aranked reveal
vriend and vijand are loving-one and hating-one mirror fossils—not cognates.
EWN, WNT, and MNW independently analyze vriend as an old present participle of the Germanic verb to love. EWN explicitly compares the formation of vijand, whose reviewed ancestry follows a different hate verb. Modern /vrint/ also makes visible how far living pronunciation can move from historical spelling. The real truth is a shared grammatical blueprint with distinct roots, not a manufactured story of one word dividing into friend and enemy.
RANK 74GRADE Aranked reveal
Lay and law are cousins; the other lays are strangers.
The set-down verb and law meet at *legh-. Lay the poem and lay meaning non-clerical arrived through different French, Latin, and Greek histories.
RANK 77GRADE Acontrarian claim
Same sound, same object, different ancestry.
Turkish kayık reaches Old Turkic kayguk; kayak reaches Inuit qayaq. Their uncanny agreement is chance resemblance, not evidence of contact or a common root.
RANK 128GRADE Aranked reveal
A figure and dough share a shaping root.
Latin figūra and the Germanic dough noun follow different formations back to *dheigh-, to form or build.
040
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “differ.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
050
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “differ.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
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.