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THE GRAPH.
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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 “Most”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
mostEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *meh₂-der. Proto-Germanic *maiz Proto-Germanic *maistaz Proto-Germanic *maist Proto-West Germanic *maist Old English mǣst Middle English most English most From Middle English most, moste, from Old English mǣst, māst, from Proto-Germanic *maistaz, *maist. Cognate with Scots mast, maist (“most”), Saterland Frisian maast (“most”), West Frisian meast (“most”), Dutch meest (“most”), German meist (“most”), Danish and Swedish mest (“most”), Icelandic mestur (“most”).
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗mostEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂el-der.? Proto-Indo-European *h₂elnós Proto-Germanic *allaz Proto-Germanic *ala- Proto-West Germanic *ala- Old English æl- Proto-Indo-European *meh₂-der. Proto-Germanic *maiz Proto-Germanic *maistaz Proto-Germanic *maist Proto-West Germanic *maist Old English mǣst Old English eallmǣst Middle English almost English almostclip. English most Clipping of almost.
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, 2024014
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
Old High German strong masculine noundossier summary
fīant
Old High German fīant—written fîant and fîjant in the Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch's length-marking convention—was already a strong masculine noun meaning enemy, opponent, or adversary. The dictionary documents personal, public and military, spiritual, and specifically Devil senses across a large variant and inflectional record. Its most revealing evidence is grammatical: in fixed formulas, usually without an article, the old participial character could still shine through. Fîant uuesan could mean to be hostile, hate someone, or wish someone ill; fîant mahhôn meant make hostile, and zi fîante tuon could mean regard as an enemy or hate. The companion fîên article independently preserves the live weak verb to hate in eighth- and ninth-century Alemannic manuscripts. The noun therefore shows a lexical fossil whose older verbal force remained locally legible without ceasing to be a noun. The displayed pronunciation is an editorial normalized approximation, not a recorded historical audio object. All displayed Old High German passages are inspected dictionary or text-edition records, not directly inspected manuscript objects.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Dutch masculine noundossier summary
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 ↗nouncontrarian claim
kayık
The Turkish word for a small boat, continued from Old Turkic kayguk and analyzed within an internal Turkic history rather than the Inuit qayaq family.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounhistorical form
rí
The Old Irish word for a king, with genitive ríg, inherited from Proto-Celtic *rīx-s in the Indo-European king branch.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗021
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
0310
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 3
openproposedposition text
Does dfiunt or fiunt securely name the Devil?
No. ONW reports that most editions read fiunt, Heyne proposed an error for diufil, both can render Latin diabolus, and the initial D has competing analyses.
openproposedposition text
Did hate originally mean pursuit or persecution?
Possibly, but not securely. Liberman points to Old English hatian in a pursuit context, German hetzen, Old English hettan, and the pursuer Hati; he presents pursuit as the most promising concrete history while leaving the rest murky.
openproposedposition text
Does Dfiunt / fiunt securely name the Devil in the earliest Old Dutch record?
No. ONW reports that most editions read fiunt, Heyne proposed an error for diufil, both can render Latin diabolus, and the initial D has competing analyses.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 7
RANK 9GRADE Acontrarian claim
The most repeated origin story is not the most rigorous answer.
Mapuche ancestry is a serious, evidenced proposal—but current RAE and a historical Spanish argument keep the deeper source genuinely open.
RANK 27GRADE Acontrarian claim
The Old English verb survives most visibly as an enemy.
The located weak-verb corpus inventory gives hettan only one form: hettende. Bosworth–Toller records that surface family repeatedly under hettend, “enemy” or “antagonist,” including Genesis and the Phoenix. The verb is therefore not a neat recovered paradigm; it is a lemma inferred at the edge between action, agent, and lexicalized foe.
RANK 57GRADE Aranked reveal
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.
RANK 61GRADE Acontrarian claim
Its most famous behavior is not universal—and even its exact donor language is unsettled.
Many hunting and fighting boomerangs do not return. Dharug and Dharawal sources have been proposed, while ANU keeps the exact language unresolved.
RANK 137GRADE A-ranked reveal
Middle Irish cais could mean love or hate—and a separate cais meant eye.
eDIL's first numbered cais headword is explicitly explained as both love and hate. Its glossary evidence equates the form with serc and grádh on the love side and miscais or mioscais on the hatred side; cited passages likewise cross the divide. Most strikingly, one Éigse line is tentatively translated "my love ... is met by hatred(?)", placing the same visible form on both sides while preserving the editor's question mark. Then eDIL's second numbered cais headword breaks the spell entirely: it means eye. The unveiling is not that love and hate were secretly identical. It is that written identity, lexicographic grouping, contextual meaning, and historical ancestry are four different claims.
RANK 174GRADE Acontrarian claim
Collect almost says its Latin construction aloud.
Latin colligere joins com- with legere: gathering together. Unlike many dramatic semantic reversals, the modern English core remains strikingly close to the historical construction.
RANK 204GRADE A−ranked reveal
The honest root of icon ends in uncertainty.
Icon securely reaches Greek eikōn “image, likeness.” A proposed deeper comparison is doubtful, so the most revealing answer is the boundary itself.
040
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “most.” 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.