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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 LOCAL6 source sections across 3 headwords matching “Can”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
Open the permanent entry for Can →Open the permanent entry for CAN →Open the permanent entry for can →
CanEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
Borrowed from Vietnamese Cần.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗CANEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
Abbreviation
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗CANEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
Borrowed from Spanish CAN.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗canEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *ǵneh₃- Proto-Indo-European *-né- Proto-Indo-European *-ti Proto-Indo-European *ǵn̥néh₃ti Proto-Germanic *kunnaną Proto-West Germanic *kunnan Old English cunnan Middle English can English can From Middle English can, first and third person singular of connen, cunnen (“to be able, know how”), from Old English can(n), first and third person singular of cunnan (“to know how”), from Proto-West Germanic *kunnan, from Proto-Germanic *kunnaną, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵneh₃- (whence also know). Doublet of con. See also: canny, cunning.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗canEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *ǵneh₃- Proto-Indo-European *-né- Proto-Indo-European *-ti Proto-Indo-European *ǵn̥néh₃ti Proto-Germanic *kunnaną Proto-West Germanic *kunnan Old English cunnan Middle English can English can From Middle English can, first and third person singular of connen, cunnen (“to be able, know how”), from Old English can(n), first and third person singular of cunnan (“to know how”), from Proto-West Germanic *kunnan, from Proto-Germanic *kunnaną, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵneh₃- (whence also know). Doublet of con. See also: canny, cunning.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗canEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
From Middle English canne, from Old English canne (“glass, container, cup, jar”), from Proto-Germanic *kannǭ (“can, tankard, mug, cup”).
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.
Mayhew–Skeat (1888)
1888; pinned HTML transcription updated October 28, 20240112
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
adjectiveheadword prefix
candid
Open or frank in modern English, inherited through French and Latin from a family of brightness and whiteness.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounheadword prefix
candidate
A person seeking selection or office; ultimately the Roman office-seeker dressed in a bright white toga.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounheadword prefix
candor
Frankness or honest expression, historically a word for brightness, radiance, whiteness, and unstained purity.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounhistorical form
avocado
An English reshaping of Spanish aguacate from Nahuatl āhuacatl, a word documented with both avocado and testicle senses.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verb · nounhistorical form
checkmate
An inescapable chess defeat and, figuratively, complete thwarting; a compound transmitted through French, Arabic, and Persian chess language.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounhistorical form
dime
The United States ten-cent coin, named with an older English and French word for a tenth part or tithe.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
etymon
A technical English noun for an earlier source form, a foreign donor, or a base used in composition or derivation.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Gothic class-III weak-verb lemmadossier summary
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 ↗Gothic masculine nd-stem common nouncontrarian claim
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 ↗Danish common-gender noundossier summary
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 ↗English common noun and historical adjectivedossier summary
friend
English friend continues Middle English frẹ̄nd and Old English frēond, an inherited Germanic nd-stem agent noun. OED identifies cognates across West, East, and North Germanic and analyzes them as noun uses of a present participle of the Germanic base behind free; Bosworth–Toller explicitly calls Old English freónd the participle of freón, a verb meaning free or love; American Heritage independently explains the formation as originally one who loves. The historical noun later covers intimate companion, ally, supporter, relation, lover, form of address, Quaker, climbing device, and social-network contact. The graph displays a normalized *frijōnd- participial formation, Germanic *frī-, the proposed Indo-European comparison *prī-, and then stops.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Norse masculine nouncontrarian claim
frændi
Old Norse frændi belongs to the same inherited Germanic present-participial family as English friend, German Freund, and Dutch vriend, but cognacy did not freeze one meaning. The Dictionary of Old Norse Prose structures 225 citations into friend; foster brother or companion; kinsman, relative, or son; parents; and ancestor, while warning that the friend and kin divisions are not sharp. Cleasby and Vigfússon call the Scandinavian semantic specialization striking and treat kinsman as the ordinary center; Zoëga likewise gives kinsman, brother, son, and ancestor. Fritzner preserves the historical formation as a participle of frjá and compares the West and East Germanic friend words. The graph joins frændi directly to the same reviewed *frijōnd-, *frī-, and proposed *prī- nodes as friend, Freund, and vriend, then stops. The displayed pronunciation is a normalized approximation, not recorded medieval audio.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗0212
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
●
French / Indo-European
candeur
brightness, purity, innocence, or candor
- DATE
- French
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
candid
open, frank, honest; originally white in English
- DATE
- 1597–today
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
candidate
a person seeking office, selection, or appointment
- DATE
- c. 1600–today
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Middle French / Indo-European
candide
brilliant; favorably disposed
- DATE
- Middle French, c. 1300–1600
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Latin / Indo-European
candidus
bright white; shining; clear
- DATE
- Latin antiquity
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 2
Latin / Indo-European
candidātus
a person standing for office; the white-clad one
- DATE
- Roman antiquity
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
candor
frankness or honest expression; earlier brightness and purity
- DATE
- 14th century–today
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Latin / Indo-European
candor
brightness, radiance, whiteness; favorable disposition
- DATE
- Latin antiquity
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Latin / Indo-European
candēre
to shine; glow; be white
- DATE
- Latin antiquity
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 3
Present-Day English / Indo-European
avocado
the fruit or tree of Persea americana
- DATE
- 1696–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Dharawal / Pama-Nyungan
bou-mar-rang
returning boomerang; proposed source candidate
- DATE
- Dharawal source candidate
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 0
Present-Day English / Indo-European
dime
a United States or Canadian coin worth ten cents
- DATE
- 1786–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
0324
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
openproposedword prefix
Is the deepest brightness root *kand- or *(s)kend-?
The graph preserves both published analyses. The newer Merriam-Webster route uses *(s)kend- and explains candēre through a zero-grade stative formation; the prior *kand- route remains proposed.
openprobableword prefix
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.
openproposedword prefix
Is *kand- a secure endpoint?
No. The Latin candēre family is attested, but its deeper reconstructed root and cognate set remain analysis-dependent.
openprobableword prefix
Did English borrow candor only through French?
French candeur is a published route, while Merriam-Webster describes the English borrowing as French and Latin. Direct learned Latin influence therefore remains visible.
resolvedestablishedword prefix
Did candid always mean honest?
No. The first reported English sense is white; clear, pure, fair, honest, frank, and photographic senses develop later.
resolvedestablishedword prefix
Was candor originally frankness?
Not exclusively. Its earliest English family includes brightness and unstained purity; straightforward honesty becomes the dominant modern sense.
openprobabledispute-title prefix
Can the lexicalization of one who hates as enemy be dated to one exact event?
No unique event is known. Cross-branch evidence places it before the recorded daughter languages, but no text records the prehistoric lexicalization moment.
openprobabledispute-title prefix
Can the exact Proto-Germanic pronunciation and paradigm be recovered?
Not completely. Comparative forms support the morphology, but no recording or written Proto-Germanic paradigm survives.
openprobabledispute-title prefix
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.
openboundarydispute-title prefix
Can aguacate be securely pushed deeper than āhuacatl?
Not from the reviewed sources. The institutional dictionaries reach the Nahuatl word and its historical witnesses but do not establish a deeper lexical ancestor.
openboundarydispute-title prefix
Can icon be securely reconstructed beyond Greek eikōn?
Not from the reviewed evidence. Merriam-Webster calls the proposed deeper base uncertain and a Lithuanian comparison doubtful; Etymonline likewise stops at uncertain Greek prehistory.
openproposeddispute-title prefix
Can the movement family be pushed securely beyond *meue-?
Not from the reviewed evidence. Etymonline publishes *meue- for the movement root, but this dossier does not promote an older form without specialist comparative review.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
RANK 186GRADE Aranked-word prefix
Candid was white before it was honest.
English first records candid in the white sense. Brightness and unblemished clarity later support fairness, frankness, and honest expression.
RANK 189GRADE Aranked-word prefix
Candor was radiance before frankness.
Latin candor and the earliest English family name brightness, whiteness, or unstained purity before modern honest expression becomes dominant.
RANK 210GRADE A−ranked-word prefix
A candidate was “dressed in white.”
Roman office-seekers signaled purity and visibility with a whitened toga.
RANK 31GRADE Aranked reveal
Gothic’s two hate verbs trade places across two passages.
The complete surviving hatan corpus contains only hatandane in Luke 1:71 and hatandans in Luke 6:27. In Luke 1, fijandam supplies enemies while hatandane supplies those hating; in Luke 6, hatandans supplies enemies while fijandam supplies those hating. Both Codex Argenteus pages are directly inspected. The lexical swap—and the class-III versus class-I dispute—cannot be represented by one timeless translation arrow.
RANK 32GRADE Aranked reveal
Enemy is a fossilized hater—but 21 Gothic tokens still refuse to choose.
Project Wulfila lists 42 candidates under fijan and 26 under the enemy noun fijands. Their intersection is exactly 21 surface tokens. Ayora Estevan explains the collision: *fi(j)and- had lexicalized as enemy before Gothic, while Gothic still possessed the productive present participle one who hates. Case and syntax resolve some passages; the remaining 21 stay public as noun-versus-participle ambiguity.
RANK 33GRADE Aranked reveal
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.
RANK 38GRADE Aranked reveal
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.
RANK 40GRADE Aranked reveal
Modern Danish kept the enemy but lost the hate verb inside its grammar.
DDO identifies fjende as historically a present participle of a verb corresponding to Old Norse fjá, to hate or persecute. Old Danish fiende then survives through a remarkable surface cloud: Fiende, Fiænde, Finde, Fînde, clipped Fiend, and both two- and three-syllable scans. The current noun no longer means that every enemy literally feels hate; it names active opposition and extends to states, ideologies, animals, weather, and abstractions. The grammatical fossil unveils a history, not a timeless essence.
RANK 46GRADE Aranked reveal
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.
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 51GRADE Aranked reveal
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.
RANK 54GRADE Aranked reveal
vriend and vijand are loving-one and hating-one mirror fossils—not cognates.
EWN, WNT, and MNW independently analyze vriend as an old present participle of the Germanic verb to love. EWN explicitly compares the formation of vijand, whose reviewed ancestry follows a different hate verb. Modern /vrint/ also makes visible how far living pronunciation can move from historical spelling. The real truth is a shared grammatical blueprint with distinct roots, not a manufactured story of one word dividing into friend and enemy.
0412
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
historical dictionary13 CLAIM LINKS
Candid — Definition, Word History, and First Known Use
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary8 CLAIM LINKS
Candor — Definition, Word History, and First Known Use
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary2 CLAIM LINKS
Candidate — Word History
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗scholarly reference72 CLAIM LINKS
Indo-European Root reg-
Calvert Watkins and American Heritage Dictionary Editors / 2022
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗scholarly reference60 CLAIM LINKS
Indo-European Root: dhghem-
Calvert Watkins and American Heritage Dictionary Editors / 2022
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗scholarly reference48 CLAIM LINKS
Indo-European Root: dheigh-
Calvert Watkins and American Heritage Dictionary Editors / 2022
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗scholarly reference43 CLAIM LINKS
Indo-European Root deru-
Calvert Watkins and American Heritage Dictionary Editors / 2022
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗research database42 CLAIM LINKS
Lemma fijan — Gothic dictionary and 42-token candidate inventory
Project Wulfila editors · Wilhelm Streitberg / 2026
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗scholarly reference37 CLAIM LINKS
Indo-European Root genə-
Calvert Watkins and American Heritage Dictionary Editors / 2022
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗scholarly reference33 CLAIM LINKS
Indo-European Root ghos-ti-
Calvert Watkins and American Heritage Dictionary Editors / 2022
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗research database32 CLAIM LINKS
Lemma fijands — Gothic enemy noun and 26-token candidate inventory
Project Wulfila editors · Wilhelm Streitberg / 2026
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary29 CLAIM LINKS
American Heritage Dictionary — friend
American Heritage Dictionary editors / 2022
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗0512
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Latin political and lexical record
candidātus / candidate / Roman antiquity
Corpus of Latin Dictionaries: candidatusattested-form prefix / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexicographic first use
Merriam-Webster lexicographic first-use record for candid
candid / candid / 1597
Candid — Definition, Word History, and First Known Useattested-form prefix / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexicographic first use
English lexical record
candidate / candidate / c. 1600
Candidate — Word Historyattested-form prefix / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexicographic first use
Merriam-Webster lexicographic first-use record for candor
candor / candor / 14th century
Candor — Definition, Word History, and First Known Useattested-form prefix / OPEN RECORD ↗DIRECTLY INSPECTEDmanuscript
Heliand manuscript M, enemy command
hatan / hatōn / Heliand composition circa 830–840; Munich manuscript second half of the ninth century
Heliand — BSB Cgm 25, scan 45, folio 22r, hatan locusreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗DIRECTLY INSPECTEDmanuscript
Heliand manuscript M, arrest scene
hatan / hatōn / Heliand composition circa 830–840; Munich manuscript second half of the ninth century
Heliand — BSB Cgm 25, scan 142, hatandiero locusreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗DIRECTLY INSPECTEDmanuscript
Heliand manuscript M, Beatitudes persecution clause
heti / heti / Heliand composition circa 830–840; Munich manuscript second half of the ninth century
Heliand — BSB Cgm 25, scan 41, folio 20r, heti locusreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗DIRECTLY INSPECTEDmanuscript
Heliand manuscript M, Pilate question
hōti / hōti / Heliand composition circa 830–840; Munich manuscript second half of the ninth century
Heliand — BSB Cgm 25, scan 150, hotie locusreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗DIRECTLY INSPECTEDmanuscript
Heliand manuscript M, accusation before Pilate
hōti / hōti / Heliand composition circa 830–840; Munich manuscript second half of the ninth century
Heliand — BSB Cgm 25, scan 152, hotean locusreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗DIRECTLY INSPECTEDmanuscript
Holm perg 15 4° folio 89v
hata / hata / c1200
ONP manuscript record — Holm perg 15 4° with folio 89v scanreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗DIRECTLY INSPECTEDprinted book
The e-rara object record and searchable scan locate John Harris's dictionary definition of algorithm.
algorithm / algorithm / 1704
Lexicon technicum: or, an universal English dictionary of arts and sciencesreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Codex Argenteus, Matthew 6:24
fijan / fijan / early 6th-century witness, source-reported
Lemma fijan — Gothic dictionary and 42-token candidate inventoryreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗06
SEARCH IS DISCOVERY, NOT PROOF
EVERY RESULT OPENS A PERMANENT EVIDENCE RECORD.
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