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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 1 headword matching “Four”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
fourEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
PIE word *kʷetwóres Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *kʷetwṓr Proto-Germanic *fedwōr Proto-West Germanic *feuwar Old English fēower Middle English four English four From Middle English four, from Old English fēower, from Proto-West Germanic *feuwar, from Proto-Germanic *fedwōr, from previous pre-Grimm *petwṓr, from Proto-Indo-European *kʷetwṓr, the neuter form of *kʷetwóres. Doublet of cuatro and quatre. Cognates include Scots fower, Saterland Frisian fjauer, West Frisian fjouwer, Dutch vier, German Low German veer, German vier, Norwegian Bokmål and Danish fire, Swedish fyra, Gothic 𐍆𐌹𐌳𐍅𐍉𐍂 (fidwōr) and, more distantly, Latin quattuor (whence Spanish cuatro, French quatre), Ancient Greek τέσσαρες (téssares), Irish ceathair, Welsh pedwar, Armenian չորս (čʻors), Lithuanian keturi, Albanian katër, Sanskrit चतुर् (catur).
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗fourEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
PIE word *kʷetwóres Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *kʷetwṓr Proto-Germanic *fedwōr Proto-West Germanic *feuwar Old English fēower Middle English four English four From Middle English four, from Old English fēower, from Proto-West Germanic *feuwar, from Proto-Germanic *fedwōr, from previous pre-Grimm *petwṓr, from Proto-Indo-European *kʷetwṓr, the neuter form of *kʷetwóres. Doublet of cuatro and quatre. Cognates include Scots fower, Saterland Frisian fjauer, West Frisian fjouwer, Dutch vier, German Low German veer, German vier, Norwegian Bokmål and Danish fire, Swedish fyra, Gothic 𐍆𐌹𐌳𐍅𐍉𐍂 (fidwōr) and, more distantly, Latin quattuor (whence Spanish cuatro, French quatre), Ancient Greek τέσσαρες (téssares), Irish ceathair, Welsh pedwar, Armenian չորս (čʻors), Lithuanian keturi, Albanian katër, Sanskrit चतुर् (catur).
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
Gothic class-III weak-verb lemmadossier summary
fijan
A Gothic class-III weak verb conventionally glossed hate or detest. Project Wulfila currently exposes 42 candidate tokens under fijan: 13 verified, eight further lexically unambiguous, and 21 explicitly ambiguous with the masculine nd-stem noun fijands, enemy. The surface inventory contains fifteen written shapes, including one exact infinitive fijan in John 7:7 and four j-less forms. Ayora Estevan shows why the overlap cannot be normalized away: Proto-Germanic had already lexicalized *fi(j)and- as enemy, while Gothic still used the matching present-participial formation for one who hates.
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 ↗Gothic neuter noundossier summary
hatis
A Gothic noun conventionally glossed hate, hatred, anger, or wrath. Project Wulfila reports fifteen corpus tokens in three surface forms: hatis, hatiza, and hatize. Its fourteen biblical tokens translate Greek wrath vocabulary rather than supplying a clean mirror of modern personal dislike: Streitberg maps the family chiefly to orgē, assigns Galatians 5:20 to thumos, and leaves Ephesians 4:31 unresolved because both Greek nouns stand together. The visible Gothic paradigm is also historical evidence: Project Wulfila treats hatis as a neuter a-stem, while Fulk analyzes it as an inherited i-stem transferred to the a-stems.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Saxon class-II weak verbcontrarian claim
hatōn
The normalized Old Saxon weak-verb lemma hatōn is supported by a four-locus dictionary inventory: Heliand 1451 writes infinitive hatan in manuscript M and haton in manuscript C; Heliand 4915 writes genitive-plural present-participial hatandiero in M and hettendero in C; manuscript C supplies preterite hatoda at Heliand 5423; and GlG supplies infinitive haton aligned with Latin odisse. Those are six witness readings at four cited loci, not six independent lexemes or four manuscripts. The first Munich infinitive and the Munich hatandiero locus were directly inspected. The category problem is deeper than spelling: Köbler also indexes the Heliand 4915 forms under the separate agent noun hėttiand, enemy. The record therefore exposes the exact point where a live participial form and a lexicalized enemy noun overlap. It does not prove that pursue was the root meaning, that every enemy hates, or that every indexed form belongs unambiguously to one synchronic category.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗adjectivedossier summary
nice
Pleasant, kind, or precise today; a fourteenth-century borrowing whose early senses included foolish, simple, wanton, and fastidious.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noun · verbhistorical form
quarantine
Isolation used to prevent contagion, named through a Romance expression for a period of forty.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗023
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
0316
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 9
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.
openestablishedposition text
Is John 7:23 the first Gothic use of the verb?
Not established. The translation belongs to a fourth-century tradition, the surviving codex is early sixth century, and no complete lost-text or spoken-language archive exists.
openprobableposition text
Did Old Saxon hatōn mean pursue as well as hate?
Köbler lexicographically gives both hassen and verfolgen, so the action range belongs in the record. The four-locus inventory does not by itself assign both readings to every token or establish their chronology.
openprobableposition text
What is the earliest secure English humility witness?
Merriam-Webster reports the fourteenth century broadly. The Middle English Dictionary supplies a circa-1390 Chaucer citation with humylitee, but this review did not inspect its underlying manuscript witness, and the located citation does not prove that no earlier English occurrence survives.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does the Codex Argenteus route map the spread of fijan?
No. Werden, Prague, Stockholm, Holland, and Uppsala trace custody of four inspected evidence objects long after Gothic ceased to be a living vernacular in those places.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Do fien, fiendi, fietos, and fieta represent four unrelated words?
No. AWB inventories them inside one weak-verb paradigm as infinitive, present participle, second-person singular preterite, and past participle.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does Köbler’s count four mean four manuscripts?
No. The entry exposes four cited loci: Heliand 1451, Heliand 4915, Heliand 5423, and one GlG gloss. Manuscript variation yields six displayed witness readings across those loci.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Were the Cotton, Vatican, Genesis, and Saxon Confession objects directly inspected?
No. Their readings are source-reported through Köbler or the Academy dictionary; no exact primary-object pixels were inspected for those four rows.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Are proverb and pro-verb the same historical word?
No. Proverb, the traditional saying, is recorded from the fourteenth century through Latin proverbium; pro-verb, a grammatical substitute, is separately dated to 1907.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 7
RANK 30GRADE Aranked reveal
Gothic hatis—the noun related to English hate—survives chiefly as wrath, including the wrath to come and the wrath of God.
Project Wulfila reports fifteen tokens in hatis, hatiza, and hatize. Fourteen are biblical; Streitberg maps the family chiefly to Greek orgē, gives Galatians 5:20 thumos, and flags Ephesians 4:31 because both stand together. Codex Argenteus folio 129r directly preserves hatiza in “the wrath to come.” Even the paradigm resists simplification: synchronic neuter a-stem, historically an i-stem remodeled into it.
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 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.
RANK 99GRADE Aranked reveal
A proverb is not a pro-verb.
Proverb the traditional saying reaches English in the fourteenth century through Latin proverbium. Hyphenated pro-verb is a distinct grammatical substitute reported only from 1907.
RANK 137GRADE A-ranked reveal
Middle Irish cais could mean love or hate—and a separate cais meant eye.
eDIL's first numbered cais headword is explicitly explained as both love and hate. Its glossary evidence equates the form with serc and grádh on the love side and miscais or mioscais on the hatred side; cited passages likewise cross the divide. Most strikingly, one Éigse line is tentatively translated "my love ... is met by hatred(?)", placing the same visible form on both sides while preserving the editor's question mark. Then eDIL's second numbered cais headword breaks the spell entirely: it means eye. The unveiling is not that love and hate were secretly identical. It is that written identity, lexicographic grouping, contextual meaning, and historical ancestry are four different claims.
RANK 177GRADE Aranked reveal
Quarantine is literally a period of forty.
The public-health sense preserves Italian quaranta: forty.
040
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “four.” 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.