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 “Inherit” 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 →Inherit
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
onomastic compound elementdossier summary
-rīx
An attested Gaulish second member meaning “king” or “prince,” visible in compound personal names such as Dumnorix and Vercingetorix and inherited from Proto-Celtic *rīx-s.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noundossier summary
December
The twelfth month in the modern calendar; its inherited Latin name literally identifies it as the tenth month.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗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 ↗German masculine noundossier summary
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 ↗noundossier summary
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 ↗noundossier summary
bride
A woman about to be or recently married; inherited from Old English brȳd and directly preserved inside bridegroom.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
calculator
A person or device that calculates, inherited from a medieval human-reckoner word and the Latin counting-pebble family.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗adjectivedossier summary
candid
Open or frank in modern English, inherited through French and Latin from a family of brightness and whiteness.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noundossier summary
conscience
The moral sense or awareness of one's conduct, inherited through medieval French from the Latin knowing-family.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noun · verbdossier summary
dialogue
Conversation, represented speech, or an exchange of ideas; inherited through medieval French and Latin from a Greek speaking-family.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noundossier summary
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 ↗English noundossier summary
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 ↗023
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
●
Old High German / Indo-European
friunt
friend, favored person, or relation; inherited loving-agent noun
- DATE
- Old High German, recorded from the eighth century
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Old Dutch / Indo-European
friunt
friend, beloved companion, or favored person; inherited loving-agent noun
- DATE
- Old Dutch, recorded around 1100
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Old English / Indo-European
gecynde
natural, native, innate, proper, fitting, or inherited by birth
- DATE
- Old English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 0
0324
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
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
Did every early fīend- form arise from inherited i-mutation?
Not necessarily. OED notes that especially in early Mercian, some apparently mutated stems may instead have been re-formed after the present participle of fēon.
openproposedposition text
Was fijands still transparently one who hates to Gothic speakers?
The formal relationship was available because the verb and productive participle survived, but inherited lexicalization means ordinary noun use need not have been compositionally reanalyzed on every occasion.
openprobableposition text
Did friend or kin come first semantically?
The inherited agent formation and daughter-language distributions do not recover one securely dated semantic split. Old Norse evidence preserves overlap rather than a single transition record.
openprobableposition text
Did every early fīend- form arise from inherited i-mutation?
Not necessarily. OED notes that especially in early Mercian, some apparently mutated stems may instead have been re-formed after the present participle of fēon.
openprobableposition text
Did Old Norse shape the Middle English forms?
Old Norse gestr may have reinforced the Middle English initial g, but the English word is fundamentally inherited from Old English and Germanic.
openprobableposition text
Is the Proto-Germanic parent exactly *xatēnan ~ *xatōjanan?
The comparative verb family is secure, but its notation and subclass are not singular. Orel prints the alternatives; Merriam-Webster foregrounds *hatōjan- for the related inherited verb formation.
openprobableposition text
Is the Proto-Germanic parent exactly *xatēnan ~ *xatōjanan?
The inherited verb family is secure enough for comparison, but reconstruction notation and the relationship among class-III and related weak formations vary.
openproposedposition text
Was hatan inherited unchanged from Proto-Germanic?
Possibly, not securely. Orel publishes *xatēnan ~ *xatōjanan behind a Germanic cognate set. Sturtevant instead judges a specifically Gothic secondary origin more probable, and Braune records fluctuation with hatjan.
openprobableposition text
Is the Proto-Germanic parent exactly *xatēnan ~ *xatōjanan?
The inherited Germanic verb family is probable, but reconstruction notation and the relationship among weak formations vary across references.
openprobableposition text
Is the Germanic parent exactly *hatōjan-?
The inherited weak verb is secure, but scholarly notation varies. Merriam-Webster prints *hatōjan-; Orel prints *xatēnan ~ *xatōjanan and includes a second related *xatjanan formation.
openproposedposition text
Did the noun hate directly continue Old English hete?
The inherited noun is part of the history, but the immediate path is disputed. American Heritage presents Middle English hate from Old English hete; Merriam-Webster says the Middle English noun was probably derived from haten and replaced hete.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
RANK 3GRADE Aranked reveal
Robot named forced labor before machinery.
The machine word begins in Czech robota: compulsory labor, corvée, or drudgery.
RANK 28GRADE Aranked reveal
German hostile agitation still carries a hound’s chase.
The medieval verb drives dogs after quarry. The same directed-force construction is soon applied to people: Middle High German records set people against one another, and Early New High German polemic sets rulers against Christians. Modern political hetzen is therefore not merely “hate” verbalized; it inherits a grammar of making another actor pursue, pressure, or attack.
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 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 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 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 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 56GRADE Aranked reveal
The Old English friend was a loving-agent noun—but not merely a modern intimate.
OED and Bosworth–Toller preserve the morphology behind frēond: an inherited nd-stem formation tied to the verb meaning free or love. The same sources then refuse a slogan-sized definition. Old English uses cover close companion, ally or non-enemy, relation, friend of God, friend versus foe, and friends acting as arbitrators. Cotton MS Vitellius A XV folio 152r visibly preserves freondum in a hall filled with favored people at Beowulf 1018. The unveiling is not that friend secretly means love in every sentence; it is that a loving-agent fossil became a socially versatile noun before modern English existed.
RANK 95GRADE Aranked reveal
Ten and decimal are cousins, not borrower and source.
English ten is inherited through Germanic; decimal is learned through Latin. Both independently continue the reconstructed Indo-European numeral family.
RANK 97GRADE Aranked reveal
A verb was once any word.
Latin verbum could mean word, utterance, expression, language, or discourse before and beside its technical grammatical sense. English inherited the specialized label.
041
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
050
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “inherit.” 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.