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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 “Once”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
onceEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
From Middle English ones, from Old English ānes, a remodelling (after ān (“one”)) of ǣnes, itself an extension of ǣne (“once”) with the genitive suffix -es. Equivalent to one + -s. Cognate with Saterland Frisian enst, insen (“once”), West Frisian iens (“once”), Dutch eens (“once”), German Low German eens, ins (“once”), German einst (“once”). More at one (including regarding the development of the pronunciation) and -s.
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- OnceEnglish · e-38699-882
Once, ons, n. Same as Ounce, the animal.
Read the full source record → - OnceEnglish · e-38699-883
Once, wuns, adv. a single time: at a former time: at any time or circumstances.—n. one time.—Once and again, more than once: repeatedly; Once for all, once only and not again; Once in a way, on one occasion only: very ra
Read the full source record →
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
arithmetic
The art or practice of counting and calculation; transmitted from Greek arithmos “number” through Latin and French.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗clue
A fact that guides discovery—once literally a ball of thread.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗emoticon
A keyboard-character sequence depicting a facial expression, posture, emotion, or attitude; an English compound of emotion and icon.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗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 ↗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 ↗hatia
Old Frisian hatia is a weak verb whose lexicographic field extends beyond an inward feeling. Hofmann and Popkema give hate or reject, damage, and a feud-language expression for harming or pursuing someone as an enemy. A May 2026 Corpus Oudfries search for word or lemma hatia returns six records in 235,462 tokens, but those are not six instances of this verb. Buma's critical note on Brokmer B 101 explicitly identifies its written hatia as atia "rear" with prothetic h, and Nijdam translates the passage as a poor mother being unable to feed her children. That token is excluded from the hate lineage. The five relevant corpus records occur in legal, road, family, and theological contexts: forms hatijen, hatie, hata, and hatien can concern harming or hindering on a road, a writing or event going against someone, or God hating perjury, lying speech, and false witnesses. The current corpus count is a bounded research surface, not a frequency estimate for medieval speech or a claim about every surviving witness. The underlying manuscripts were not directly inspected for this dossier, no earliest-use claim is made, and no exact historical pronunciation is invented.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗hatjan
A Gothic weak verb meaning hate, represented by exactly one verified corpus token: the present participle hatjandam in Matthew 5:44. Project Wulfila lemmatizes that token as class-I hatjan, while the parallel Luke 6:27 command uses class-III hatandans from hatan. Braune treats the two shapes as conjugational fluctuation; Orel and the current corpus keep distinct formations visible. The normalized infinitive, the written participle, and the reconstructed parent are therefore never collapsed.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗hostis
The Latin word for an outsider or public enemy, preserving the historical semantic turn from foreign stranger to armed opponent.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗man
A human being and, in later dominant use, an adult male human; inherited through Old English mann from the Germanic human-person family.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗mussel
A bivalve mollusk whose English history runs through Middle English muscle and Old English muscelle into the same Latin mouse family as muscle.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗κῆδος
Ancient Greek κῆδος is an attested neuter noun whose lexical record spans care or concern, anxiety and grief, troubles, mourning and funeral rites, an object of care, and connection by marriage. LSJ documents the Doric variant κᾶδος, Homeric plural forms such as κήδεα or elided κήδεʼ, an Aeschylean play between Helen as an object of care and marriage connection, and a warning that some marriage-based readings of Homeric passages are wrong. Comparative sources place the noun beneath a proposed *ḱh₂d-es- formation and *ḱeh₂d- base alongside Celtic and Germanic material, but the semantic unity of care, grief, battle, hostility, pursuit, and hate remains disputed. The dossier preserves the Greek semantic network, the proposed ancestry, and the explicit boundary as separate claim layers.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
arithmetic
the art, practice, or branch of mathematics concerned with numbers and calculation
- DATE
- mid-13th century–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
κῆδος
kêdoscare, concern, anxiety, grief, trouble, mourning, funeral rites, object of care, or connection by marriage
- DATE
- Homeric and later Ancient Greek
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
Does the Éigse line certainly use cais once for love and once for hatred?
Not certainly. eDIL tentatively translates "mo chais is cais 'na agaid" as "my love ... is met by hatred(?)" and prints a question mark on the second reading.
Is the PIE salt root written *sal- or *séh₂l-?
Both appear in the reviewed references at different representational resolutions. SET-U reuses *séh₂l- as the canonical dossier node and records *sal- as an alternative notation, not a second word.
Does the word commemorate an abstract concept or a person?
It ultimately reflects a geographic personal name, “the Khwārizmian,” which became attached to transmitted arithmetic.
Does negative caisgen reveal the timeless core of cais?
No. The compound supplies one negative formation, not a license to reinterpret every positive citation as concealed hatred.
Is Hebrew satan an ancestor node of English fiend?
No. OED invokes Hebrew śāṭān, adversary, to explain the conceptual and translation background of the Devil-as-Enemy use; it does not derive the English word from Hebrew.
Is the infinitive fijan itself written?
Yes, once in the current inventory: John 7:7 writes fijan. The other 41 candidates are inflected forms, and fian is a normalized variant redirect rather than a separately inventoried exact infinitive token.
Was frændi historically a loving-agent formation?
Yes at the comparative word-formation level. OED places the Old Icelandic form in the inherited participial cognate set, while Cleasby–Vigfússon and Fritzner derive it as a participle of frjá.
Did hassen once express hostile action or pursuit?
Yes in the reviewed historical accounts. Duden says the old forms also meant pursue; DWB labels hostile pursuit or persecution the original sense and cites Old and Middle High German alignments.
Were English love and hate once the same word?
No reviewed evidence connects English love directly to English hate. Middle Irish cais has an ambivalent love-and-hatred field inside a disputed comparison, but that is not a genealogical edge between the English words.
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.
Could hatia concern damaging or hindering a road?
Yes in the reviewed legal records. The Register to Jus Municipale Frisonum pairs hatijen with hindrien on the army road, and the Book of Rudolf places hatie in a ban concerning that road.
Did hospital originally mean a medical institution?
No. The earliest English senses concern lodging for travelers and charitable residence; medical care becomes established later.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
One Gothic hate verb survives once—in a command to do good to those who hate you.
Project Wulfila’s only verified hatjan token is hatjandam in Matthew 5:44, directly visible on Codex Argenteus folio 3v. A parallel “love your enemies” command in Luke 6:27 instead uses hatandans from class-III hatan. The translation gloss “hate” therefore hides a genuine grammatical and historical dispute.
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.
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.
The Old Dutch enemy noun outlived the hate verb that created it.
ONW counts twenty-six fīunt occurrences across six attested case-number cells, yet classifies the noun as synchronically unsegmented and says the corresponding hate verb is no longer known in Dutch. Comparative evidence reconstructs the noun as an old present-participial formation: the hating one. The grammar therefore preserves a fossil in nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative records after Dutch lost the living verb that once made the formation transparent. Six cells are evidence, not a complete paradigm; the early Psalms records survive in later copies; and the lone Devil gloss is disputed.
Care, grief, funerals, and in-laws occupy one Greek noun—but hate does not secretly mean care.
LSJ's κῆδος entry moves through care and concern, anxiety and grief, troubles, mourning and funeral rites, an object of care, and connection by marriage. Homeric κήδεʼ can be many-troubled woes; Aeschylus can make Helen an object of care while playing on marriage affinity. Comparative sources then place the noun beside Celtic and Germanic hatred words under *ḱh₂d-es- and *ḱeh₂d-. The reveal is not a mystical reversal in which hate “really” means care. Merriam-Webster calls the semantic relations far from transparent, Liberman challenges the wider family's unity, and the Greek evidence itself resists a single linear story.
Only one of emoticon and emoji contains emotion.
Emoticon is English emotion plus icon. Emoji is Japanese picture plus character: conceptual neighbors, unrelated formations.
Mussel and muscle were once spelling twins.
Middle English could spell the shellfish muscle. The shellfish and anatomical words ultimately belong to Latin’s mouse-derived musculus family, though the naming resemblance itself is not fully recoverable.
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.
Wife once meant woman more broadly.
Old English wīf meant woman or wife and survives inside wīfman, the ancestor of woman; its deeper source remains uncertain.
Girl could once refer to a boy.
Middle English girle could denote a child of either sex; later English narrowed it toward a female child or young woman.
Feign once included making, not only pretending.
Middle English feynen could mean make, fabricate, or make a likeness as well as dissemble or pretend, continuing the fingere shaping family.
Truth and troth were once one word family in plain sight.
Middle English trouth and Old English trēowþ covered truth, faith, loyalty, and pledged fidelity before the modern words specialized.
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “once.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
John Harris’s Lexicon technicum prints ALGEBRA as a headword and identifies it as an analytic art concerned with equations.
algebra / algebra / 1704
Lexicon technicum: or, an universal English dictionary of arts and sciencesreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗John Harris’s Lexicon technicum prints ETYMOLOGY as a headword and defines it as the part of grammar concerned with words’ origins and true signification.
etymology / etymology / 1704
Lexicon technicum: or, an universal English dictionary of arts and sciencesreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Odyssey, care or concern for others
κῆδος / κῆδος / Homeric epic, source-reported
Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek-English Lexicon — κῆδοςreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗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.