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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 LOCAL3 source sections across 2 headwords matching “Read”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
ReadEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
English and Scottish surname, variant of Reed.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗readEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
Etymology tree Old English rǣdan Middle English reden English read From Middle English reden, from Old English rǣdan (“to counsel, advise, consult; interpret, read”), from Proto-West Germanic *rādan, from Proto-Germanic *rēdaną (“advise, counsel”), from Proto-Indo-European *Hreh₁dʰ- (“to arrange”). Cognate with Scots rede, red (“to advise, counsel, decipher, read”), Saterland Frisian räide (“to advise, counsel”), West Frisian riede (“to advise, counsel”), Dutch raden (“to advise; guess”), German raten (“to advise; guess”), Danish råde (“to advise”), Swedish råda (“to advise, counsel”), Persian رده (rade, “to order, to arrange, class”). In West Germanic the verb had a sense “interpret”, which developed further into “interpret letters” in English and “interpret by intuition, guess” on the continent. Compare rede.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗readEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
From Middle English redde (simple past), red, rad (past participle), from Old English rǣdde (simple past), (ġe)rǣded (past participle), conjugations of rǣdan (“to read”); see above.
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 →MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
cais
eDIL separates two Irish headwords written cais. The first, also recorded as caise, is explicitly explained both as love and as hate; its cited passages and glossary equations range from searc and grádh "love" to miscais and mioscais "hatred", with context deciding individual readings. One Éigse line is tentatively translated so that the same visible form occurs on both sides: "my love ... is met by hatred(?)". The question mark matters. The second eDIL headword cais means "eye" and is excluded from this semantic lineage. These records establish a remarkable lexicographic opposition, not one timeless essence, a chronology from love to hate, or proof that every occurrence belongs to one historically indivisible sense. John T. Koch compares the noun with Proto-Celtic *katsi- < *kad-t/si- and a wider *kad- family, but that ancestry and its proposed Germanic comparison remain open. eDIL itself generally supplies etymologies only selectively. No manuscript pixels were directly inspected, no earliest-use or historical-frequency claim is made, and no exact pronunciation is invented.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗checkmate
An inescapable chess defeat and, figuratively, complete thwarting; a compound transmitted through French, Arabic, and Persian chess language.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗clew
A ball of thread, a nautical corner or line, and the older spelling behind clue.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗clue
A fact that guides discovery—once literally a ball of thread.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗collect
To bring together, accumulate, infer, or receive; from Latin colligere, literally built with a together-prefix and legere.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗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 ↗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 ↗frēond
Old English frēond is the directly attested source-language noun behind modern friend. OED analyzes it as an inherited strong masculine agent noun in -nd, ultimately a noun use of the present participle of the Germanic base behind free, and documents West Saxon frēond, Northumbrian and Kentish frīond, Kentish frīand, mutated frīend and frȳnd, endingless plurals, and re-formed frēondas. Bosworth–Toller prints freónd and friónd, explicitly links freónde loving to freón or freógan, and supplies examples for companion, ally, relation, friend of God, friend versus foe, and friends acting as arbitrators. OED independently preserves close companion, non-enemy, ally, and kinsman senses in Old English. Cotton MS Vitellius A XV folio 152r was directly inspected at Beowulf 1018, where the pixels visibly preserve freondum in Heorot innan wæs freondum afylled. The route reuses the reviewed *frijōnd-, *frī-, and proposed *prī- nodes and then stops. The displayed pronunciation is a normalized approximation, not a recorded voice.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗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 ↗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 ↗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 ↗heti
Old Saxon heti is an attested noun, not a reconstructed Proto-Germanic form. Köbler prints the normalized citation form hėti* with a trailing asterisk, then gives three cited lexical loci whose inflections produce five witness readings: accusative singular heti at Heliand 1322 in manuscripts M, C, and V; dative singular heti at Genesis 60; and genitive singular hetias in the tenth-century Saxon Confession. No nominative singular appears in that inventory, but the exact surface heti is visibly written in Munich Cgm 25. The directly inspected Heliand line places the noun in the Beatitudes, where righteous people endure rîkioro manno heti endi harmquidi, powerful men's hostility or persecution and hostile speech. The Saxon Confession instead places hetias beside malice, envy, and slander among confessed wrongs. Those contexts establish a range broader than one private feeling without proving that persecution was the prehistoric root meaning. Fulk and Köbler analyze the Old Saxon comparison as an i-stem; Pfeifer describes the wider Germanic noun as an old es/os-stem, so the inherited morphological account remains public rather than falsely harmonized.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
*drae
tea; name of a plant
- DATE
- Middle Chinese reconstruction
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 5
*hlaibaz
loaf of bread
- DATE
- Proto-Germanic
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
cais
love; hate, with readings dependent on context
- DATE
- Middle Irish and later Irish dictionary citations
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
clew
a ball of thread or yarn
- DATE
- c. 1300–1600s
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 2
clew
a ball of thread; a guiding clue; a nautical corner, loop, or line
- DATE
- before the 12th century–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
cliewen
ball, sphere, ball of thread
- DATE
- before 1150
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 2
hlāf
loaf; bread
- DATE
- Old English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 3
lectiō
a reading; act of reading
- DATE
- Late Latin
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
lectūra
a reading; act of reading
- DATE
- Late / Medieval Latin
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
legenda
things to be read
- DATE
- Medieval Latin
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
legende
a saint’s life or reading; inscription
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
legende
reading matter; saint’s life
- DATE
- Anglo-French
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
Can the exact lexicalization date of the loving participle be known?
No. The formation predates the daughter-language records and is already nominal in the earliest High German evidence.
Did English algorism arrive through French or directly from Medieval Latin?
The sources preserve both channels. Merriam-Webster names Middle French and Medieval Latin; Etymonline emphasizes Old French from Medieval Latin.
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.
Are the opposite readings one polysemous word, merged historical homonyms, or a lexicographic convenience?
eDIL groups them in one headword but does not, by that editorial act alone, settle the full historical relationship among every love and hate occurrence.
Did candidates claim moral purity?
The whitened toga is historical and lexical. Reading it as a guaranteed moral-purity claim goes beyond what the word formation alone proves.
Can the exact moment when a loving one became the noun friend be dated?
No. The formation predates the daughter-language records, while lexicalization is inferred from already-established nouns in those languages.
Does dfiunt or fiunt securely name the Devil?
No. ONW reports that most editions read fiunt, Heyne proposed an error for diufil, both can render Latin diabolus, and the initial D has competing analyses.
Was shun the original meaning of hata?
Not established. Cleasby and Vigfússon propose that the poetic dative shun sense was probably original, then immediately say hatta with double t may be the better reading.
Does hata gulli simply mean hate gold?
Not securely. Cleasby treats the dative phrase as spend gold, ONP has a separate prose contempt-for-gold record, and the poetic reading itself is questioned.
Do the written endings alone settle the participles’ case and gender?
No. Project Wulfila gives masculine or neuter genitive plural for hatandane and masculine nominative or accusative plural for hatandans. The clauses resolve the contextual readings through syntax and Greek alignment, but the surface forms remain formally syncretic.
Is Heliand 4915 unambiguously an enemy noun?
No. The separate hėttiand entry establishes the lexicalized noun analysis, while the verb entry retains the same readings as participial evidence. The surviving phrase alone does not erase the overlap.
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.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
Evidence became a thread you could follow.
Old English cliewen was a ball of thread; the labyrinth metaphor turned it into guidance through uncertainty.
Legislation came before legislate.
The noun preserves a Latin law-bearing or law-proposing compound. English legislate was later back-formed from the already existing noun family.
The d in kindred is an intruder—and kind is not in the word.
Kindred is kin plus a fossilized native element meaning a condition or state. One branch reaches the birth root; the other reaches a fit-together root. The modern d arrived between n and r after the compound already existed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The verb disappeared from ordinary English; its prehistoric hater survived as fiend.
Old English fēogan meant hate or persecute and had a productive paradigm including feógende. The Germanic active-participial formation had already lexicalized as an enemy noun before the recorded branches. English therefore preserves the family most visibly not in its ordinary verb hate, but in fēond and modern fiend.
Lord began as the loaf guardian.
Old English hlāford combines hlāf, loaf, with weard, guardian; title and mastery grew from a household compound.
Lady is not the feminine form of lord.
Old English hlǣfdige shares lord’s loaf component but pairs it with a kneading element, not guardian.
Loaf is the word inside both lord and lady.
Old English hlāf continues as loaf and is also the exact historical bread component shared by hlāford and hlǣfdige.
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
A Gothic Grammar with Selections for Reading and a Glossary — hatan and hatjan
Wilhelm Braune · translated and edited by Gerhard H. Balg / 1895
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗An Anglo-Saxon Reader — The Phœnix
James W. Bright, editor / 1913
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
A passage in John Harris’s Lexicon technicum cites a Lecture by Nehemiah Grew about varieties of taste read before the Royal Society.
lecture / lecture / 1704
Lexicon technicum: or, an universal English dictionary of arts and sciencesreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗A bibliographic note in John Harris’s Lexicon technicum names December while pointing readers to the December 1682 Acta Eruditorum.
December / December / 1704
Lexicon technicum: or, an universal English dictionary of arts and sciencesreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Merriam-Webster source-reported English record
legible / legible / 15th century
Legible — Definition, Word History, and First Known Usewitness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗Old English reader occurrence reported by Bosworth–Toller
hete / hete / Old English prose record
HETE — An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Onlinereporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Bright’s edited Phoenix, preserved in the Exeter Book
hettan / hettan / Old English Phoenix record
An Anglo-Saxon Reader — The Phœnixreporting 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.