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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 LOCAL2 source sections across 1 headword matching “Child”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
childEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
From Middle English child, from Old English ċild, from Proto-West Germanic *kilþ, *kelþ, from Proto-Germanic *kelþaz (“womb; fetus”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵelt- (“womb”), perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *gel- (“to ball up, amass”). Cognate with Danish kuld (“brood, litter”), Swedish kull (“brood, litter”), Icelandic kelta, kjalta (“lap”), Gothic 𐌺𐌹𐌻𐌸𐌴𐌹 (kilþei, “womb”), Sanskrit जर्त (jarta), जर्तु (jártu, “vulva”).
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗childEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
From Middle English childen, from the noun child.
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, 2024015
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
nouncontrarian claim
boy
A male child or young man; Middle English also used the word for a male servant or churl, and its origin remains disputed.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
girl
A female child or young woman; in Middle English the word could denote a child or young person of either sex.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Frisian weak verbdossier summary
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 ↗nouncontrarian claim
humus
The dark organic portion of soil; an English scientific borrowing through New Latin from Latin humus, earth or ground.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
word
A meaningful spoken or written unit; an inherited English form whose Germanic branch is cognate with Latin verbum rather than borrowed from it.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗023
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
●
Present-Day English / Indo-European
boy
male child; young man
- DATE
- 14th century–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
girl
female child; young woman
- DATE
- 14th century–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Middle English / Indo-European
girle
child or young person of either sex; girl
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
0313
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 9
resolvedestablishedposition text
Did boy begin as the ordinary word for a male child?
Not exclusively. American Heritage records Middle English boi as male servant, churl, and young male.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Are fiend and friend the same root with opposite meanings?
No. OED calls friend an antonym with a similar agent-noun formation. Similar morphology does not establish one lexical root.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Do Frigg, Friday, Frederick, and Siegfried descend from the noun friend?
No. American Heritage places them in related Germanic formations under the wider *frī- family; they are collateral relatives, not descendants of English friend.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Are fiend and friend the same root with opposite meanings?
No. OED says friend is an antonym with a similar agent-noun formation. Similar morphology does not establish one lexical root or cognate pair.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Did Middle English girl mean only a female child?
No. Girle could denote a child or young person of either sex and could even be specified as a boy.
resolvedestablishedposition text
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.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does the Brokmer B 101 passage mean a mother cannot hate her children?
No. In context it says that if the mother is so poor that she cannot otherwise feed or rear her children, she may take something from the wergeld.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Is German Kind the source of English kind?
No. German Kind belongs to the comparative Germanic birth family, but it is a cognate branch rather than a donor into English. Similar form and a child sense do not establish a borrowing route.
resolvedprobableposition text
Did Dutch lief come from English love?
No. Dutch lief is an inherited Germanic adjective cognate with forms including Gothic liufs and German lieb; English love is a separate noun descendant in the same wider family.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 4
RANK 44GRADE Aranked reveal
One corpus hit written hatia is not the hate verb at all.
The May 2026 Corpus Oudfries search returns six records under word or lemma hatia, but spelling alone creates a trap. In Brokmer B 101, Buma explicitly identifies hatia as atia "rear" with prothetic h; Nijdam's translation confirms a poor mother unable to feed her children. That token is excluded from the hate lineage. The five relevant records then reveal the genuine verb's own range: harm or hindrance on an army road, legal adversity, and God hating perjury, lying speech, and false witnesses. The contrarian truth is therefore philological twice over: one identical surface belongs elsewhere, while the inherited verb itself extends beyond private feeling.
RANK 122GRADE Aranked reveal
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.
RANK 150GRADE Acontrarian claim
Hotel and hospital are siblings, not parent and child.
French hôtel continues Old French hostel, while hospital follows a related learned route through the same Latin guest-accommodation family. English hotel is not simply a shortening of English hospital.
RANK 199GRADE A-contrarian claim
Dutch lief is love’s adjective cousin, not its child.
Dutch lief belongs with Gothic liufs and German lieb in the inherited dear-or-beloved adjective branch. English love is a separate noun route in the same deeper family.
040
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “child.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
051
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
06
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.