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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 LOCAL2 source sections across 1 headword matching “Ew”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
ewEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
Onomatopoeic, ideophonic. Compare oh, ugh.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗ewEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.
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, 2024MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
-rīx
An attested Gaulish second member meaning “king” or “prince,” visible in compound personal names such as Dumnorix and Vercingetorix and inherited from Proto-Celtic *rīx-s.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Feind
The modern German noun for a personal, political, military, or ideological enemy or opponent. Duden derives it through Middle High German vīnt or vīant and Old High German fīand, literally the hating one; DWDS dates Old High German fīant and fījant to the eighth century and identifies the Germanic ancestor as a petrified substantivized present participle. Grimm’s dictionary independently compares Gothic fijands, Old English fēond, English fiend, Dutch vijand, and Nordic forms, while warning that its own still-deeper foam hypothesis required confirmation. The reviewed route therefore follows the inherited enemy noun to reconstructed *fi(j)and- and *fi(j)ēn-, then treats *peh₁- as proposed and stops.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Freund
German Freund continues Middle High German vriunt and Old High German friunt. DWDS/Pfeifer, Duden, and Grimm independently analyze the inherited Germanic formation as a substantivized present participle of the verb represented by Gothic frijōn and Old English frēogan: historically a loving or favorably disposed one. The record is semantically wider than a modern close companion: the historical dictionaries also document neighbor, relative, lover, ally, supporter, patron, address, and euphemistic uses. The graph joins the High German line to the same reviewed *frijōnd- and *frī- nodes as English friend, keeps *prī- proposed, and stops.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Hass
The modern German noun for intense aversion, rejection, or hostility toward a person, group, or institution. Duden traces Middle and Old High German haʒ to suffering, sorrow, and resentment and records the 1996 spelling change from Haß to Hass. DWDS/Pfeifer reports the Old High German noun from the eighth century and places it in the Germanic family of Old Saxon heti, Old English hete, Old Norse hatr, Gothic hatis, and related forms. Grimm’s DWB preserves a more complicated semantic record: hostile pursuit or action, anger expressed in deeds, ordinary hostile disposition, and even measured rivalry during friendly competition. The reviewed route reuses *hatiz- and the qualified *ḱh₂d-es- / *ḱeh₂d- comparison, then stops.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Liebe
The German noun for love, inherited through Middle and Old High German and a Germanic abstract-noun formation distinct from the immediate noun ancestry of English love.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗aguacate
The Spanish word for the avocado tree and fruit, borrowed from Nahuatl āhuacatl, whose historical records include both fruit and testicle senses.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗avocado
An English reshaping of Spanish aguacate from Nahuatl āhuacatl, a word documented with both avocado and testicle senses.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗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 ↗bride
A woman about to be or recently married; inherited from Old English brȳd and directly preserved inside bridegroom.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗bridegroom
A man about to be or recently married; remodeled from bridegome after the older man-word gome became opaque.
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 ↗chthonic
Of the underworld or of things in and under the earth; a learned English continuation of the Greek earth family.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
*drew-o-
firm or steadfast formation; wood or pledge branch
- DATE
- Proto-Indo-European suffixed variant
- MATCH
- transliteration
- DOSSIERS
- 2
*lewbʰ-
to love, desire, care for
- DATE
- c. 4500–2500 BCE
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 5
*trewam
tree, wood
- DATE
- Proto-Germanic horizon
- MATCH
- transliteration
- 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
hassen
to hate or strongly dislike
- DATE
- Early New High German textual record
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 1
hetzen / hessen / hittzen
hunt with dogs; drive; set people against one another
- DATE
- Early New High German
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 1
humus
soil; earth; organic soil material
- DATE
- New Latin
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 1
trewe
faithful, steadfast, true
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- transliteration
- DOSSIERS
- 1
trewe
agreement, treaty, pledge
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- transliteration
- DOSSIERS
- 1
trewes
agreements, pledges
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- transliteration
- DOSSIERS
- 1
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
Did English receive December through Old English or French?
The reviewed source allows either Old English or Anglo-French transmission from Latin and does not choose between them.
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.
Does the English record begin in the 13th or 14th century?
The reviewed reports differ. Etymonline gives an early-thirteenth-century algorism; Merriam-Webster gives a fourteenth-century first-known-use horizon.
Does the English record begin in the 13th or 15th century?
The reviewed source reports differ. Etymonline gives mid-thirteenth-century arsmetike; Merriam-Webster gives a fifteenth-century first-known-use horizon.
What securely precedes Old English brȳd?
The sources publish broad Germanic comparanda, including Old High German brūt, but this dossier does not yet have a reviewed source that warrants one reconstructed parent.
Did love develop into hate, hate into love, or both from another meaning?
No reviewed source establishes one direction. The citations show an opposition; they do not date a semantic transition.
Is Proto-Celtic *katsi- the secure direct parent of cais?
Koch publishes the comparison, but the reviewed materials do not expose a complete dated Goidelic derivation or independent consensus sufficient to mark the edge established.
How was historical cais pronounced in each cited period and region?
Not directly recoverable from the reviewed evidence. Written forms and variants do not constitute recorded audio or a complete phonological reconstruction.
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.
Is *lˤra the final word on the ancestry of tea?
It is the final reviewed reconstruction in this dossier, not a declaration that no deeper hypothesis exists. No unique deeper form is promoted until a competing analysis is encoded with direct evidence.
Was emoticon first used in 1987 or only by 1992?
Merriam-Webster reports first known use in 1987; Etymonline reports the word by January 1992 and quotes an August 1992 explanation.
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.
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.
German hostile agitation still carries a hound’s chase.
The medieval verb drives dogs after quarry. The same directed-force construction is soon applied to people: Middle High German records set people against one another, and Early New High German polemic sets rulers against Christians. Modern political hetzen is therefore not merely “hate” verbalized; it inherits a grammar of making another actor pursue, pressure, or attack.
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.
Old Norse fjándi was an enemy before it was the Devil.
Cleasby and Vigfússon identify the inherited -nd- shape as participial and gloss the older formation as properly a hater. Their first sense is the ordinary enemy; only after the introduction of Christianity does the historical account assign fjándi the fiend branch. ONP then reveals how far the word traveled: 222 citations across enemy, demon, evil spirit, pagan god, Satan, and derogatory uses for hated or bewitched beings and things. The truth is not that every enemy secretly hates. It is that a lexicalized agent noun became an ordinary social category, then accumulated new religious and expressive work.
Old Norse hate was action, contempt, humiliation, and feeling inside one verb.
ONP's 101-citation prose article orders four active senses before its participial and reciprocal branches: persecute; despise, reject, or cast aside; mock or humiliate; and hate, despise, or stand hostile. Fritzner independently moves from pursuit and destruction to ordinary hate. A c1200 manuscript leaf visibly writes hata in a command to love chastity and hate no person. The article's sense order is not a chronology, and the poetic concordance is explicitly unreviewed; the reveal is the documented semantic range, not an invented first essence.
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.
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.
The modern spelling arrived after the word.
Urdu historical records preserve چا and چاہ before standard modern چائے displaced them. A familiar written form can be the newest layer of an older spoken history.
True was steadfast before it was merely factual.
Old English trēowe meant faithful; its Germanic *treuwaz branch reaches reconstructed *deru- “firm, solid, steadfast; wood, tree.” Factual accuracy is real, but not the whole history.
A truce was grammatically plural.
Modern singular truce continues Middle English trewes, the plural of an agreement noun from Old English trēow “fidelity.” A ceasefire is historically a set of pledged terms.
Tree and truth meet at firmness, not fantasy.
Tree follows the wood branch through Germanic *trewam; truth follows the fidelity branch through *treuwaz and *treuwithō. They meet at *deru- “firm, solid, steadfast; wood, tree.”
Lord began as the loaf guardian.
Old English hlāford combines hlāf, loaf, with weard, guardian; title and mastery grew from a household compound.
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands — vijand
Marlies Philippa · Frans Debrabandere · Arend Quak · Tanneke Schoonheim · Nicoline van der Sijs / 2009
citation-key prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands — vriend
Marlies Philippa · Frans Debrabandere · Arend Quak · Tanneke Schoonheim · Nicoline van der Sijs / 2009
citation-key prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Kuning — Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen V
Rosemarie Lühr / 2014
citation-key prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗liuben; giliuben; liubi; liubî — Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen
Rosemarie Lühr / 2014
citation-key prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Kunni — Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen V
Rosemarie Lühr / 2014
citation-key prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Kind — Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen V
Rosemarie Lühr / 2014
citation-key prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Altwîb — Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen I
Albert L. Lloyd and Otto Springer / 1988
citation-key prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Hî(w)a¹ — Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen IV
Albert L. Lloyd and Rosemarie Lühr / 2009
citation-key prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics: A
John Aldrich et al. / 2026
publisherAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Toward a constructional framework for research on language change
Elizabeth Closs Traugott / 2014
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Verbum — Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary
Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short / 1879
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Clew — Definition, Word History, and First Known Use
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
EWA hî(w)a¹ lexical record
wīb / wīb / Old High German lexical record
Hî(w)a¹ — Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen IVwitness-title prefix / OPEN RECORD ↗Codex Argenteus, Matthew 5:44
hatjan / hatjan / early 6th century
Codex Argenteus facsimile 6 — folio 3v, Matthew 5:42–47reporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Codex Argenteus, Matthew 5:43
fijands / fijands / early 6th century
Codex Argenteus facsimile 6 — folio 3v, Matthew 5:42–47reporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Codex Argenteus, Matthew 5:44
fijands / fijands / early 6th century
Codex Argenteus facsimile 6 — folio 3v, Matthew 5:42–47reporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Codex Argenteus, Matthew 10:36
fijands / fijands / early 6th century
Codex Argenteus facsimile 31 — folio 27r, Matthew 10:34–40reporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗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 scienceswitness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗Cicero, De officiis 1.12.37, as reported in Lewis and Short
hostis / hostis / 44 BCE
hostis — Lewis and Short Latin Dictionaryreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Codex Argenteus, Matthew 5:43
fijan / fijan / early 6th-century witness, source-reported
Gothic Bible word analysis — Matthew 5:43, fiais and fiandreporting source / OPEN 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 ↗Old English lexical record
cliewen / clue / Old English period
Bosworth–Toller: cliewenreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Matthias von Beheim, Matthew 5:11
haʒʒen / hassen / 1343 textual horizon, source-reported
Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm — hassenreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Swedish New Testament, Matthew 5:43
fiende / fiende / 1526
Svenska Akademiens ordbok — FIENDEreporting 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.