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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 2 headwords matching “Moder”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
ModerEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
Various origins: * Borrowed from German Moder, from a Proto-Germanic personal name composed of the elements *mōdaz (“boldness, courage”) + *harjaz (“army”). * Borrowed from Slovak Móder, an occupational surname from Middle High German mader (“reaper”). * Borrowed from Polish Moder, from Middle Low German mōder (“mother, womb; mare”). * Borrowed from Slovene Moder, a nickname for a wise man, from moder (“wise, prudent”). * Borrowed from Swedish Modér, an ornamental surname whose first element is from mo (“sandy heath”).
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗moderEnglish (en) · Unnumbered etymologySource text
Clipping of moderate.
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
December
The twelfth month in the modern calendar; its inherited Latin name literally identifies it as the tenth month.
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 ↗bayou
English bayou, recorded by 1763, came from Louisiana French bayouque. An early Choctaw *bayok is a plausible proposed source, but the historical form and its alleged contraction to modern bók are not securely attested.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗candid
Open or frank in modern English, inherited through French and Latin from a family of brightness and whiteness.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗candor
Frankness or honest expression, historically a word for brightness, radiance, whiteness, and unstained purity.
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 ↗decimate
To destroy or reduce drastically; borrowed from a Latin verb built on “tenth” and first used in English for killing every tenth member of a group.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗etymological
Of, relating to, or based on etymology; an Early Modern English adjective whose exact formation is described differently by major historical dictionaries.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗etymologist
A specialist in etymology; an English agent noun formed on etymology with -ist.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗etymologize
To discover, formulate, state, or study etymologies; an English verb formed from etymology with -ize.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
friend
a trusted or close companion; an ally, supporter, relation, form of address, or specialized modern contact
- DATE
- English; spelling attested from Middle English and standard today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
jawára / jaguara
large carnivore; a broader predator label than the modern English species term
- DATE
- Tupi
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
μυς
mysa body muscle; in learned use, also a mouse
- DATE
- Modern Greek
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 1
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
Is betroth built on truth or troth?
The historical base is Middle English trouth or trouthe, where the modern truth and troth spellings were not yet cleanly separated; mapping it to only one modern headword overstates the evidence.
Did English chai come from one identifiable donor language?
The modern culinary sense strongly points toward South Asian usage, but Merriam-Webster lists Turkish, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and Urdu source forms without selecting one unique donor.
When did exhume acquire the archival recovery metaphor?
The modern dictionary records the figurative sense, but the reviewed evidence does not date one secure semantic pivot.
Does fiende securely descend from exactly *peh₁-?
Only as a qualified modern proposal. Kroonen publishes the route; Hellquist records a historically different deeper comparison, and neither recovers a written ancestral token or unique original semantic scene.
Does the ODS Sanskrit comparison prove a direct Sanskrit-to-Danish line?
No. ODS preserves an older comparison with Sanskrit pīyati, while modern comparative work gives a reconstructed route. Neither source licenses a historical borrowing or direct line.
Does fjende securely descend from exactly *peh₁-?
Only as a qualified modern proposal. The Germanic noun-and-verb relationship is firmer than the displayed Indo-European route.
Does fjá securely descend from exactly *peh₁-?
Only as a qualified modern proposal. The Germanic comparison is firmer than the displayed Indo-European route.
Does fjándi securely descend from exactly *peh₁-?
Only as a qualified modern proposal. The Germanic noun-and-verb relation is firmer than the displayed Indo-European route.
Does freondum at Beowulf 1018 identify every person as a modern intimate friend?
No. The local text says Heorot was filled with freondum, but the manuscript alone does not recover each referent’s exact social relationship or a modern intimacy category.
Does fīant securely descend from exactly *peh₁-?
Only as a qualified modern proposal. The Germanic noun-and-verb relation is firmer than the displayed Indo-European route.
Does fīēn securely descend from exactly *peh₁-?
Only as a qualified modern proposal. The Germanic comparison is firmer than the displayed Indo-European route.
Is hetzen simply the same verb as hassen?
No. Duden analyzes hetzen as a causative formation related to hassen—historically make hate or bring to hostile pursuit—while the modern verbs have distinct forms and ordinary meanings.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
Truth began with firmness and fidelity.
Before truth centered factual correspondence, its family named what was firm, faithful, and steadfast.
Robot named forced labor before machinery.
The machine word begins in Czech robota: compulsory labor, corvée, or drudgery.
Nice crossed from ignorance to approval.
Latin nescius “ignorant” became foolish or wanton, then fastidious and precise, and finally pleasant or kind.
The modern stigma of Weib is not the timeless nature of wīb.
Duden marks modern Weib increasingly discriminatory, while Old High German records preserve wīb in old-woman and wife expressions; the deeper origin remains unresolved.
King comes from the kin family; kin does not come from king.
English kin independently continues Old English cynn and Germanic *kunja-. The royal title is a separate suffixed formation on that lineage base, so the shared letters preserve real morphology without making either modern word the parent of the other.
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.
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.
Swedish fiende is not built from modern hata.
SO says fiende originally meant hatande. SAOB and Hellquist make the hidden grammar explicit: the enemy noun is a lexicalized present participle of the Germanic fi(j)- verb, literally one who hates. But SAOB’s separate hata article places the modern Swedish hate verb in the hat- family. Swedish therefore carries two different Germanic hate histories side by side: one fossilized inside the everyday noun enemy, the other alive as the everyday verb hata.
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.
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 Old English friend was a loving-agent noun—but not merely a modern intimate.
OED and Bosworth–Toller preserve the morphology behind frēond: an inherited nd-stem formation tied to the verb meaning free or love. The same sources then refuse a slogan-sized definition. Old English uses cover close companion, ally or non-enemy, relation, friend of God, friend versus foe, and friends acting as arbitrators. Cotton MS Vitellius A XV folio 152r visibly preserves freondum in a hall filled with favored people at Beowulf 1018. The unveiling is not that friend secretly means love in every sentence; it is that a loving-agent fossil became a socially versatile noun before modern English existed.
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.
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
A Brief Biological History of Quarantine: Modern use of an ancient tool
Lesley Evans Ogden / 2021
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗μυς — Dictionary of Standard Modern Greek
Institute for Modern Greek Studies editors / 1998
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
Modern plural evil spirits
fiend / fiend / 2017
Oxford English Dictionary — fiend, n., revised 2026witness-title prefix / OPEN RECORD ↗Duden modern sense inventory
hetzen / hetzen / Modern German lexicographic record
hetzen — Rechtschreibung, Bedeutung, Definition, Herkunftreporting 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.