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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 “Erse”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
ErseEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
From Scots Erse (“Irish”), from earlier Ersche, Ersch, a contraction of Erisch, Erische (“Irish”), from Middle English Erische, Irische, Irisch (“Irish”). Doublet of Irish. Compare also Scots Irisch.
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
nounhistorical form
avocado
An English reshaping of Spanish aguacate from Nahuatl āhuacatl, a word documented with both avocado and testicle senses.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verb · nounhistorical form
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 · verbhistorical form
dialogue
Conversation, represented speech, or an exchange of ideas; inherited through medieval French and Latin from a Greek speaking-family.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Danish common-gender noundossier summary
fjende
Modern Danish fjende is the ordinary noun for a person, state, force, ideological opponent, or figurative thing that harms something else. Den Danske Ordbog derives it from Old Norse fjándi, compares German Feind, and identifies the older formation as a present participle of a verb corresponding to Old Norse fjá, to hate or persecute. Gammeldansk Ordbog records fiende broadly from 1100–1300. Ordbog over det danske Sprog preserves fiende, finde, and related spellings, an ordinary enemy sense, military and animal uses, abstract threats, and a special religious Devil branch. Holbergordbog shows that Fiende could still scan as either three syllables or two, alongside Fiænde, Finde, Fînde, and clipped Fiend. The word is therefore a grammatical fossil, not a current psychological definition: a lexicalized one-who-hates became the ordinary Danish enemy noun and accumulated broad contextual work. The current pronunciations are dictionary records, not retrojections into medieval Danish. No manuscript or print object is claimed as directly inspected.
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 ↗Old English verbdossier summary
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 ↗German weak verbcontrarian claim
hassen
The modern German weak verb for feeling hatred toward a person or for strongly disliking a thing or action. Duden traces it through Middle High German haʒʒen and Old High German haʒʒēn / haʒʒōn and adds that the older verb also meant pursue. Grimm’s DWB makes the semantic contrast explicit: it calls hostile pursuit or persecution the original sense and then describes a later, more muted center in hostile disposition rather than hostile deeds. BMZ and Lexer independently document the Middle High German verb and its literary record. The reviewed ancestry follows the reconstructed Germanic weak-verb alternatives into the *hatiz- family, preserves the qualified *ḱh₂d-es- / *ḱeh₂d- proposal, and then stops.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Norse weak verbcontrarian claim
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 ↗noun · verbcontrarian claim
hate
An inherited Germanic hostility word whose English noun and verb histories converge imperfectly: Old English preserves both hete and hatian, Middle English may have remodeled the noun from the verb, and the proposed deeper Indo-European family remains semantically opaque.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old English masculine noundossier summary
hete
An attested Old English noun for hate, enmity, malice, spite, hostility, and persecution, productive in compounds and securely aligned with the Germanic hate family; whether Middle English hate directly continues it remains disputed, and the proposed deeper Indo-European route remains semantically opaque.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Saxon masculine i-stem noundossier summary
heti
Old Saxon heti is an attested noun, not a reconstructed Proto-Germanic form. Köbler prints the normalized citation form hėti* with a trailing asterisk, then gives three cited lexical loci whose inflections produce five witness readings: accusative singular heti at Heliand 1322 in manuscripts M, C, and V; dative singular heti at Genesis 60; and genitive singular hetias in the tenth-century Saxon Confession. No nominative singular appears in that inventory, but the exact surface heti is visibly written in Munich Cgm 25. The directly inspected Heliand line places the noun in the Beatitudes, where righteous people endure rîkioro manno heti endi harmquidi, powerful men's hostility or persecution and hostile speech. The Saxon Confession instead places hetias beside malice, envy, and slander among confessed wrongs. Those contexts establish a range broader than one private feeling without proving that persecution was the prehistoric root meaning. Fulk and Köbler analyze the Old Saxon comparison as an i-stem; Pfeifer describes the wider Germanic noun as an old es/os-stem, so the inherited morphological account remains public rather than falsely harmonized.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old English weak-verb lemmahistorical form
hettan
An Old English weak-verb lemma supported by a strikingly narrow surface record. A full-corpus lemmatisation inventory lists only hettende under hettan; Bosworth–Toller redirects the bare headword to hettend, “enemy,” while Orel compares the verb with Gothic hatjan and Middle High German hetzen. Clark Hall instead assigns hettende to hatian. The dossier therefore separates the comparative verb, the recorded enemy word, and the unresolved lemma assignment.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗0210
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
*
Old High German / Indo-European
*hezzen
a reconstructed weak verb meaning chase or persecute
- DATE
- reconstructed Old High German bridge
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
avocado
the fruit or tree of Persea americana
- DATE
- 1696–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Middle English / Indo-European
chek / chekke
a chess warning; assault, adverse event, restraint
- DATE
- 14th–15th centuries
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Old English / Indo-European
fēogan
to hate or persecute
- DATE
- Old English written record
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Old Norse / Indo-European
hata
to persecute; reject or despise; humiliate; hate; damage or destroy in poetic use; become or remain hostile in reflexive constructions
- DATE
- Old Norse prose and poetic record
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Old English / Indo-European
hatian
to hate, treat as an enemy, persecute, or in a cited context pursue
- DATE
- Old English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 2
Old Saxon / Indo-European
heti
hate, hostility, enmity, or persecution
- DATE
- Old Saxon Heliand, Genesis, and Saxon Confession record
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Old English / Indo-European
hettan
a lexicographic weak-verb lemma associated with hating, attacking, or persecuting
- DATE
- Old English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
hostile
of an enemy; antagonistic, adverse, or unfriendly
- DATE
- 1580–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Ancient Greek / Indo-European
διαλέγεσθαι
dialegesthaito converse or discuss; a formation with dia- and legein
- DATE
- Ancient Greek
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
0320
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
openproposedposition text
Was the original meaning hostile pursuit or suffering and sorrow?
Unresolved. DWB argues for hostile pursuit or persecution as the original center; Duden glosses the origin as suffering, sorrow, and resentment; DWDS foregrounds hostile disposition, resentment, and enmity.
openprobableposition text
Did the shift from persecution to feeling happen in one dated event?
No single event is established. DWB describes a contrast between hostile deeds and a more muted hostile disposition, while historical and modern examples show overlapping contextual ranges.
openprobableposition text
Are hatan and fijan perfect synonyms?
They overlap in the Gothic hate field, but the surviving passages do not prove total synonymy. Luke 1 uses fijandam for enemies and hatandane for those hating; Luke 6 reverses those constructional roles. Sturtevant treats semantic association as relevant to formal association, not as proof that every sense and construction was identical.
openprobableposition text
Does hatan securely descend from *ḱeh₂d-?
Only probably. The Germanic family is stronger than the deeper proposal; grief, care, mourning, hatred, pursuit, and persecution do not form one transparent semantic sequence, and some proposed cognates may not belong together.
openproposedposition text
Did hate originally mean pursuit or persecution?
The Germanic action evidence makes pursuit or persecution a serious proposal, not a settled origin. Beowulf, hettan, German hetzen, and Hati support the comparison, but the full deep family remains murky.
openproposedposition text
Was pursuit the original meaning of hatian?
Possibly relevant, not established. Beowulf, hettan, German hetzen, and the action contexts motivate a pursuit or persecution proposal, but the deeper semantic comparison remains unresolved.
openprobableposition text
Does Galatians 5:20 prove hatis always meant explosive anger?
No single verse can establish an invariant meaning. Galatians aligns plural hatiza with Greek thumoi, while other biblical contexts use orgē and Ephesians 4:31 does not permit a clean one-to-one choice. The exact semantic center of ordinary Gothic remains underdetermined by translation texts.
openprobableposition text
Does hatjan securely descend from *ḱeh₂d-?
Only probably. The Germanic family is stronger than the deeper proposal; grief, care, mourning, hatred, pursuit, and persecution do not form one transparent semantic sequence, and some proposed cognates may not belong together.
openproposedposition text
Did hate originally mean pursuit or persecution?
Possibly, but not securely. Liberman points to Old English hatian in a pursuit context, German hetzen, Old English hettan, and the pursuer Hati; he presents pursuit as the most promising concrete history while leaving the rest murky.
openproposedposition text
Was pursue the securely recovered basic meaning of the root?
No consensus is established. DWB calls hostile pursuit or persecution original inside the German history, while Pokorny’s account explicitly says the Germanic facts do not establish pursue as the root’s basic meaning.
openestablishedposition text
Was persecution the securely recovered original meaning?
No. The Heliand context supports persecution or endured hostility at one branch locus, but a daughter-language context cannot by itself establish semantic priority in Proto-Germanic or Proto-Indo-European.
openprobableposition text
Does heti securely descend from *ḱeh₂d-?
Only as a qualified proposal. Formal correspondence is published, but grief, pain, care, battle, hostility, persecution, and hatred do not form one transparent semantic sequence.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 8
RANK 25GRADE Aranked reveal
Hate was enemy-directed action as well as feeling in Old English.
Old English hatian could mean treating as an enemy, persecuting, or injuring; Beowulf puts the verb beside hostile deeds. The deeper claim that pursuit was the first meaning remains open, and the graph says so.
RANK 32GRADE Aranked reveal
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 40GRADE Aranked reveal
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 43GRADE Aranked reveal
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.
RANK 49GRADE Aranked reveal
The token is attested even though the dictionary headword wears an asterisk.
Köbler heads the Old Saxon noun hėti* but lists written accusative and dative heti plus genitive hetias beneath it. The exact Munich Heliand token is directly visible in the clause rîkioro manno heti endi harmquidi. The dictionary count three also hides a second distinction: it means three lexical loci, while Heliand 1322 survives with M, C, and V readings, producing five reported witness readings across the dossier. The star therefore belongs to an editorial headword layer; it does not erase the attested surface or turn Old Saxon into Proto-Germanic. The visible Heliand context is endured hostility or persecution, while the Saxon Confession groups hetias with malice, envy, and slander. Even the inherited grammar stays open: Fulk and Köbler use an i-stem analysis, whereas Pfeifer calls the wider noun an old es/os-stem.
RANK 57GRADE Aranked reveal
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.
RANK 60GRADE A-ranked reveal
German hassen has an action buried under the feeling.
Duden says Middle High German haʒʒen and Old High German haʒʒēn / haʒʒōn formerly also meant pursue. Grimm’s DWB goes further: it calls hostile pursuit or persecution the original sense, reports Old High German following or pursuit alignments and Behaim persecution contexts, then explicitly describes the later sense as more about hostile disposition than hostile deeds. Modern Duden centers hatred and strong aversion. The contrast is real; the one certain prehistoric scene is not.
RANK 89GRADE Aranked reveal
The host could also be the guest.
Latin hospes carried reciprocal host-and-guest roles. The opposition feels fixed in modern English, but the historical hospitality relationship could reverse when obligations were returned.
0412
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
historical dictionary23 CLAIM LINKS
Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek-English Lexicon — κῆδος
Henry George Liddell · Robert Scott · Henry Stuart Jones · Scaife ATLAS editors / 1940
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary15 CLAIM LINKS
Holbergordbog — Fiende
Aage Hansen · Sv. Eegholm-Pedersen · Christopher Maaløe
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary10 CLAIM LINKS
ἔτυμος — A Greek-English Lexicon
Henry George Liddell · Robert Scott · Henry Stuart Jones / 1940
publisherAUDIT EVERY USE ↗digital scholarly edition9 CLAIM LINKS
Heliand Cgm 25 transcription after Schmeller 1830 with Sievers 1878 verse numbering
Johann Andreas Schmeller · Eduard Sievers · Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe / 1830
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗institutional lexicon9 CLAIM LINKS
Qajaq-terms
H. C. Petersen / 1987
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary6 CLAIM LINKS
ἐτήτυμος — A Greek-English Lexicon
Henry George Liddell · Robert Scott · Henry Stuart Jones / 1940
publisherAUDIT EVERY USE ↗digitized primary source5 CLAIM LINKS
De Bello Gallico — Latin edition in the Scaife Viewer
Gaius Julius Caesar; T. Rice Holmes, editor / 1914
publisherAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary5 CLAIM LINKS
hostis — Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary
Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short / 1879
publisherAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary4 CLAIM LINKS
Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek-English Lexicon — κήδω and κήδομαι
Henry George Liddell · Robert Scott · Henry Stuart Jones · Scaife ATLAS editors / 1940
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary4 CLAIM LINKS
ἐτεός — A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect
Richard John Cunliffe / 1924
publisherAUDIT EVERY USE ↗digitized primary source2 CLAIM LINKS
Aeneid — Latin edition in the Perseus text collection
Publius Vergilius Maro; J. B. Greenough, editor / 1881
publisherAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary1 CLAIM LINKS
πρόσωπον — Liddell, Scott, Jones Ancient Greek Lexicon
Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones, and Perseus Editors / 1940
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗056
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
DIRECTLY INSPECTEDmanuscript
Heliand manuscript M, Beatitudes persecution clause
heti / heti / Heliand composition circa 830–840; Munich manuscript second half of the ninth century
Heliand — BSB Cgm 25, scan 41, folio 20r, heti locusreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Anonymous, Fourth Grammatical Treatise verse 8
hata / hata / poem attributed 1335; concordance date unreviewed
Lexicon Poeticum — hata, verbreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
rēx in Vergil’s Aeneid
rēx / rēx / first-century BCE poem, inspected through an 1881 digital edition
Aeneid — Latin edition in the Perseus text collectionreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
rēgis in Vergil’s Aeneid
rēgis / rēx / first-century BCE poem, inspected through an 1881 digital edition
Aeneid — Latin edition in the Perseus text collectionreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Heliand manuscript C, Beatitudes persecution clause
heti / heti / Heliand composition circa 830–840; later Cotton witness
Altsächsisches Wörterbuch — hatōn and hėttiandreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Heliand manuscript V, Beatitudes persecution clause
heti / heti / Heliand composition circa 830–840; Vatican fragment witness date not normalized here
Altsächsisches Wörterbuch — hatōn and hėttiandreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗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.