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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 LOCAL1 source section across 1 headword matching “Harm”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
harmEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
From Middle English harm, herm, from Old English hearm, from Proto-West Germanic *harm, from Proto-Germanic *harmaz (“harm; shame; pain”). Cognate with Dutch harm (“harm”), German Harm (“harm”), Danish harme (“indignation, resentment”), Icelandic harmur (“sorrow, grief”), Swedish harm (“anger, indignation, harm”).
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
German masculine nounhistorical form
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 ↗English nounhistorical form
fiend
An inherited English noun whose earliest recorded sense was enemy or foe, not demon. Old English fēond belonged to a Germanic lexicalized one-who-hates formation; Middle English fẹ̄nd preserved enemy, Satan, demon, possession, and monster senses across extensive spelling variation; modern fiend continues the same English line. OED’s revised 2026 entry marks the literal enemy sense obsolete after the medieval record, explains the Devil as the ultimate Enemy, and documents long-versus-short vowel competition before the long vowel became dominant by the eighteenth century. The Middle English Dictionary independently exposes 188 quotations across eight senses without claiming a complete corpus.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Swedish common-gender nounhistorical form
fiende
The ordinary Swedish noun for an enemy, opponent, hostile state, or figurative threat continues Old Swedish fiande or fiände and an inherited Germanic present-participial formation: literally the hating one. Svenska Akademiens current dictionary calls the word Common Germanic and gives the original force hatande; SAOB and Hellquist independently derive the noun from the fi(j)- hate verb behind Gothic fijan and Old Norse fjá. Modern Swedish hata belongs to a separate Germanic hat- family, so fiende is not transparently built from the verb Swedish speakers now use for hate. Historical Swedish also used Fienden for the Devil, but that branch is not the word’s only or current central meaning. All medieval and early-modern examples here are source-reported lexical records, not directly inspected manuscript objects.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Gothic class-III weak-verb lemmahistorical form
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 ↗Gothic masculine nd-stem common nounhistorical form
fijands
A Gothic masculine nd-stem noun conventionally glossed enemy. Project Wulfila currently exposes 26 candidates: three verified noun assignments, two further noun-only assignments, and 21 surface forms also listed under the living verb fijan. Ayora Estevan explains the collision diachronically: Proto-Germanic had already lexicalized the present-participial *fi(j)and- as enemy, while Gothic retained productive one-who-hates participles beside the noun. The five noun-only candidates use fiand, fijands, fijande, and fijandis; all five were inspected in Codex Argenteus facsimiles.
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 verbhistorical form
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 Norse masculine nounhistorical form
fjándi
Old Norse fjándi is a masculine noun whose inherited shape still exposes a prehistoric agent formation. Cleasby and Vigfússon compare Gothic fiands, Old English feond, German Feind, Swedish fiende, and Danish fjende, identify the nd as participial, and gloss the older formation as properly a hater. They then distinguish the ordinary enemy sense from a post-Christian fiend development. The University of Copenhagen Dictionary of Old Norse Prose supplies 222 citations and six semantic zones: enemy or opponent; devil, monster, or demon; evil spirit; pagan god; the Devil or Satan; and a derogatory term for a hated or bewitched person, animal, or object. Lexicon Poeticum independently exposes 49 poetic records, including source-reported tenth-century enemy uses and later Christian fiend uses, while warning that its concordance and dates require checking. The noun therefore does not possess one timeless true meaning: an inherited lexicalized hater became an ordinary enemy word, and the branch later accumulated several demonic and derogatory senses. The displayed pronunciation is an editorial normalized approximation, not recorded historical audio. No underlying manuscript object is claimed as directly inspected in this dossier.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old English verbhistorical form
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 ↗Old English strong masculine nd-agent nounhistorical form
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 High German strong masculine nounhistorical form
fīant
Old High German fīant—written fîant and fîjant in the Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch's length-marking convention—was already a strong masculine noun meaning enemy, opponent, or adversary. The dictionary documents personal, public and military, spiritual, and specifically Devil senses across a large variant and inflectional record. Its most revealing evidence is grammatical: in fixed formulas, usually without an article, the old participial character could still shine through. Fîant uuesan could mean to be hostile, hate someone, or wish someone ill; fîant mahhôn meant make hostile, and zi fîante tuon could mean regard as an enemy or hate. The companion fîên article independently preserves the live weak verb to hate in eighth- and ninth-century Alemannic manuscripts. The noun therefore shows a lexical fossil whose older verbal force remained locally legible without ceasing to be a noun. The displayed pronunciation is an editorial normalized approximation, not a recorded historical audio object. All displayed Old High German passages are inspected dictionary or text-edition records, not directly inspected manuscript objects.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Dutch masculine nounhistorical form
fīunt
Old Dutch fīunt is the normalized headword behind a twenty-six-occurrence historical-dictionary record for enemy or opponent. ONW classifies the noun as synchronically unsegmented but says it was originally the present participle of the verb corresponding to Old High German fīēn and Gothic fijan, a verb no longer known in Dutch. Its frequency table preserves six case-number cells: nominative and genitive singular plus nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative plural. Those are not a complete paradigm. The article displays twenty representative location blocks after warning that locations in the semantic profile have been reduced. Most early Wachtendonck Psalms material is linguistically dated 901–1000 but survives in copies dated 1595–1605, circa 1598, or 1701–1800; no tenth-century manuscript object was inspected. One dfiunt or fiunt gloss aligned with Latin diabolus is textually disputed, and one Groningen psalm gloss is explicitly assigned to Old Frisian by the dictionary. This dossier therefore treats fīunt as a nominal fossil with a partially preserved inflectional record, not as a productive Old Dutch participle or a complete transparent paradigm.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗022
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
*
Proto-Indo-European / Indo-European
*peh₁-
a proposed base associated with harm, blame, suffering, or hate
- DATE
- proposed Proto-Indo-European base
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 14
Old Frisian / Indo-European
hatia
to hate or reject; to damage; in feud-language, to harm or pursue as an enemy
- DATE
- Old Frisian legal and theological records, text 1220-1300 through manuscripts 1490-1540
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
0324
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
openproposedposition text
Does fijan securely descend from *peh₁-?
Only as a proposal. The Germanic *fi(j)ēn- comparison is stronger than the deeper route; the exact intermediate morphology and semantic unity of harm, blame, suffering, and hate remain reconstructive.
openprobableposition text
Is fēogan a strong verb or a weak contracted verb?
Bosworth–Toller labels the full FEÓGAN entry strong, but labels linked contracted feón weak and contracted. The displayed past forms in -de also require grammatical explanation. The dossier preserves the source-level tension rather than silently harmonizing it.
openproposedposition text
Does vijand securely descend from exactly *peh₁-?
Only as a qualified proposal. Kroonen and EWN publish deeper laryngeal-bearing analyses, but their notation and intermediate formation differ and the harm, blame, suffering, hostility, and hate path is not uniquely recoverable.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Is the Devil the central current meaning of fiende?
No. SO defines an opponent prepared to harm a counterpart and supplies ordinary, military, figurative, and natural-enemy uses. SAOB marks the older Devil use as barely current by 1924.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does fjende literally mean hater today?
No. One-who-hates describes the inherited formation. Current Danish defines an enemy by opposition or harm, not by a required inner emotion.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Can fjende refer only to people?
No. Historical and current records apply it to states, military forces, animals, ideologies, weather, sleep, passions, and other harmful abstractions.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does DDO listing hater nearby prove fjende still means hater?
No. A near-word list is lexical navigation, not identity. DDO’s definition centers active opposition, harm, or destruction and its origin field separately explains the old participle.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Are all six search hits instances of the hate or harm verb?
No. Buma identifies the Brokmer B 101 hatia as atia "rear" with prothetic h, and Nijdam's translation concerns a mother unable to feed her children.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Did hatia mean only inward hatred?
No. Hofmann and Popkema give hate or reject, damage, and a feud-language expression for harming or pursuing someone as an enemy. The corpus records include road and legal-adversity contexts beside theological hate.
resolvedprobableposition text
Are the remaining five records all semantically identical?
No. They range across road harm or obstruction, writing or events going against a person, family-law adversity, and divine hatred; two Jurisprudentia Frisica passages remain only cautiously glossed.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Did hatr mean only a private inner feeling?
No. ONP’s principal gloss includes enmity and spite, and its citations include definitions involving desire to harm, opposition to love, and contextual persecution. That range does not make every token an action.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does Heliand 1322 use heti only for a private feeling?
No. Köbler gives Latin persecutio for the Heliand use, and the visible clause says righteous people endure powerful men's heti and harmquidi. The noun functions in an external hostility or persecution setting.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
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 33GRADE Aranked reveal
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 34GRADE Aranked reveal
The Devil entered English as the Enemy—and the enemy was a fossilized hater.
OED’s revised history identifies fiend as an inherited Germanic noun made from the present participle of the hate verb. Old English fēond meant enemy and foe as well as Devil; OED explains Satan as the ultimate Enemy and marks the literal enemy sense obsolete after the medieval period. Cotton MS Vitellius A XV still visibly preserves feondes in a concrete foe’s-footprint scene at Beowulf 2289.
RANK 35GRADE Aranked reveal
A fiend was an enemy before it was a demon.
OED’s revised history starts with enemy or foe and explains the Devil as the ultimate Enemy. The English noun continues Old English fēond, itself inherited from a Germanic lexicalized one-who-hates formation. Middle English then preserves enemy, Satan, demon, possession, and monster senses together before the literal enemy sense becomes obsolete.
RANK 36GRADE Aranked reveal
German Feind is English fiend’s undemonic cousin: both fossilize one who hates.
Duden, DWDS/Pfeifer, and Grimm independently carry Feind through Middle and Old High German to a substantivized hating participle. OED places English fiend on the collateral Old English branch. German retained the ordinary enemy or opponent at its semantic center; English turned the cognate toward Devil, demon, and vicious person.
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 Aranked reveal
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 39GRADE Aranked reveal
Old Norse fjándi was an enemy before it was the Devil.
Cleasby and Vigfússon identify the inherited -nd- shape as participial and gloss the older formation as properly a hater. Their first sense is the ordinary enemy; only after the introduction of Christianity does the historical account assign fjándi the fiend branch. ONP then reveals how far the word traveled: 222 citations across enemy, demon, evil spirit, pagan god, Satan, and derogatory uses for hated or bewitched beings and things. The truth is not that every enemy secretly hates. It is that a lexicalized agent noun became an ordinary social category, then accumulated new religious and expressive work.
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 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 42GRADE Aranked reveal
The ordinary Old Norse enemy outlived the finite hate verb behind it.
ONP classifies fjá as poetic and exposes no prose citations. Cleasby, Fritzner, and Lexicon Poeticum converge on three Eddic contexts, while normalized texts preserve active fjá, finite fíár, and reflexive fiásk. Cleasby then points to fjándi as the participial relative that remained across Germanic. ONP gives that separate enemy noun 222 prose citations and a large semantic range. The two corpus totals are not directly frequency-comparable, and neither proves an exact extinction event; together they reveal the asymmetry between a tiny finite-verb record and the prolific lexicalized enemy branch.
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.
041
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
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.