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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 “Wen”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
wenEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
From Middle English wen, wenne, from Old English wenn, wænn (“wen”), from Proto-Germanic *wanjaz. Cognate with Dutch wen (“goiter”), Low German Ween (“wen”), dialectal German Wenne (“wen”), Danish van, væne.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗wenEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
Inherited from Old English wynn.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗wenEnglish (en) · Etymology 3Source text
Eye dialect spelling of when.
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 →015
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
noun · verbhistorical form
clew
A ball of thread, a nautical corner or line, and the older spelling behind clue.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noun · verbhistorical form
clue
A fact that guides discovery—once literally a ball of thread.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Dutch masculine nouncontrarian claim
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 ↗Old High German weak-verb citation formdossier summary
hazzōn
An Old High German citation form in the inherited Germanic hate-verb family, printed beside hazzēn and spelling variants hazēn, hazōn, haʒʒēn, and haʒʒōn. Starling’s source record dates hazzēn to the eighth century and hazzōn to the ninth; Duden and Grimm’s DWB group the ēn and ōn forms in the history of German hassen. Corpus-wide research independently shows that some Old High German class-III ēn verbs also occur with class-II ōn forms, but the accessible abstract does not establish that hazzōn is one of its twenty repeatedly attested double forms. DWB reports haʒôn aligned with Latin aemulari and the forms hatamas and hatent with insequamur and insequuntur. Those reports support an action range involving following or hostile pursuit; they are not directly inspected manuscript tokens. Pokorny’s account, as transmitted by Starling, explicitly warns that the Germanic evidence does not prove “pursue” was the root’s basic meaning. The route therefore distinguishes the normalized headword, the combined historical variants, the reconstructed Germanic weak verb and noun family, the qualified Indo-European comparison, and the point where knowledge ends.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Dutch masculine noundossier summary
vijand
The ordinary Dutch noun for an enemy or opponent descends through Middle Dutch viant or vient and Old Dutch fīunt or fīant from a Germanic present-participial formation: literally the hating one. ONW counts twenty-six Old Dutch records and says the corresponding hate verb is no longer known in Dutch; VMNW counts 407 thirteenth-century records across enemy, Devil, and monster senses. Several Dutch etymologists propose that the medieval use for the Devil helped preserve the word’s full ending, unlike vriend, but they mark that explanation as possible or probable rather than demonstrated. The earliest Old Dutch Devil reading is itself textually disputed, and the Wachtendonck Psalms witnesses are later copies, not directly inspected tenth-century objects.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗021
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
037
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 4
openprobableposition text
Can the nd-ending alone distinguish enemy from one who hates?
No. Galatians 4:16 nominative fijands functions as the noun enemy, Romans 11:28 accusative fijandans is analyzed as a participle, and Romans 12:9 fiandans takes an accusative object. Twenty-one other corpus tokens remain explicitly lexically and morphosyntactically ambiguous.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Was Old Dutch fīunt a noun?
Yes. ONW classifies it as a masculine noun, calls all twenty-six occurrences appellative, and supplies a nominal inflection table.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does frequency twenty-six mean twenty-six surviving manuscripts?
No. It is an occurrence frequency inside the dictionary corpus. The semantic profile currently displays twenty representative location blocks and explicitly warns that locations have been reduced.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Was hete an isolated noun rather than a word-building base?
No. Bosworth–Toller lists eleven derived first elements ending in -hete; Clark Hall separately records hetenīþ, heterūn, hetesprǣc, hetesweng, and heteðanc.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 3
RANK 6GRADE Aranked reveal
Evidence became a thread you could follow.
Old English cliewen was a ball of thread; the labyrinth metaphor turned it into guidance through uncertainty.
RANK 47GRADE Aranked reveal
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.
RANK 188GRADE Aranked reveal
A clue was a ball of thread.
The literal clew could guide someone through a maze; only later did clue become the dominant spelling for evidence that guides reasoning.
041
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
054
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Old English lexical record
cliewen / clue / Old English period
Bosworth–Toller: cliewenreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Bosworth–Toller lexical record for cynn
cynn / kin / Old English dictionary record
Cyn, cynn — Bosworth–Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionarywitness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Amor as an unwilling enemy
Feind / Feind / eighteenth-century German, source-reported
Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm — feind, m.witness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Jurisprudentia Frisica
hatia / hatia / Codex Roorda manuscript dated 1490-1504; source-reported
Corpus Oudfries — hatia in Jurisprudentia Frisicawitness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗06
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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.