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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 LOCAL3 source sections across 1 headword matching “Left”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
leftEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
From Middle English left, luft, leoft, lift, lyft, from Old English left, lyft (“weak, clumsy, foolish”), attested in Old English lyftādl (“palsy, paralysis”), from Proto-Germanic *luft-, from *lubjaną (“to castrate, lop off”) (compare dialectal English lib, West Frisian lobje, Dutch lubben), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)lewp-, *(s)lup- (“hanging limply”). Compare Scots left (“left”), North Frisian lefts, leeft, leefts (“left”), West Frisian lofts (“left”), obsolete Dutch lucht, leftsch, lefts, lefs (“left”), dialectal Dutch loof (“weak, worthless”), archaic Low German lucht (“left”).
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗leftEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
From Middle English left, variant of laft (“remaining, left”), from Old English lǣfed, ġelǣfed, past participle of lǣfan (“to leave”). More at leave.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗leftEnglish (en) · Etymology 3Source text
From Middle English levit, ilevet, y-levyd, from Old English ġelȳfd, ġelȳfed, past participle of Old English ġelȳfan, lȳfan (“to allow, permit”), equivalent to leave (“to give leave to, allow, grant, permit”) + -ed.
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.
Chambers (1908)
1908- LeftEnglish · e-38538-7207
Left, left, pa.p. (Spens.) lifted.
Read the full source record → - LeftEnglish · e-38538-7208
Left, left, pa.t. and pa.p. of leave.—adj. Left′-off, laid aside.
Read the full source record → - LeftEnglish · e-38538-7209
Left, left, adj. being on the left side—also Left′-hand.—n. the side opposite to the right: the part of an assembly sitting on the president's left hand, generally the more liberal or democratic section.—adv. toward the
Read the full source record →
012
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
verb · nouncontrarian claim
checkmate
An inescapable chess defeat and, figuratively, complete thwarting; a compound transmitted through French, Arabic, and Persian chess language.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old High German weak verbdossier summary
fīēn
Old High German fīēn—printed fîên in the Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch—was a weak verb meaning to hate, not love, be hostile to, detest, or reject. The official dictionary says it is attested only in Alemannic manuscripts of the eighth and ninth centuries, then inventories an infinitive fien, present participle fiendi, second-person singular preterite fietos, and accusative plural masculine past participle fieta. Three rule-text records concern hating discipline, one’s own will, or no person; gloss records align the participial forms with Latin exosus or exosos; and an Esther gloss aligns fien with detestari. These are source-reported edition and dictionary records, not directly inspected manuscript objects, and the broad manuscript horizon does not identify one exact first token. A separate twelfth-century article printed fien [sic] with the gloss ubere is explicitly left uninterpreted by the dictionary and is not merged into this hate verb. Beside the verb, Old High German had the already lexicalized enemy noun fīant, whose old participial character could still shine through in fixed phrases. The graph therefore shows a living daughter verb beside a grammatical fossil without pretending that either attested form is the reconstructed Proto-Germanic word itself. No historical sound recording exists and the dossier does not display a fabricated phonetic certainty.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗021
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
031
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 1
openprobableposition text
Does checkmate literally mean the king is dead?
That is a longstanding Arabic analysis, but Merriam-Webster and Encyclopaedia Iranica favor a Persian loan meaning left, helpless, broken, or paralyzed.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 0
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BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “left.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
050
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “left.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
06
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