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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 LOCAL4 source sections across 1 headword matching “Must”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
mustEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
From Middle English moste ("must", literally, "had to", the past tense of Middle English moten (“to have to”)), from Old English mōste (“had to”), 1st & 3rd person singular past tense of mōtan (“to be allowed, be able to, have the opportunity to, be compelled to, must, may”), from Proto-Germanic *mōtaną. Cognate with Dutch moest (“had to”), German musste (“had to”), Swedish måste (“must, have to, be obliged to”). More at mote.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗mustEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
From Middle English moste ("must", literally, "had to", the past tense of Middle English moten (“to have to”)), from Old English mōste (“had to”), 1st & 3rd person singular past tense of mōtan (“to be allowed, be able to, have the opportunity to, be compelled to, must, may”), from Proto-Germanic *mōtaną. Cognate with Dutch moest (“had to”), German musste (“had to”), Swedish måste (“must, have to, be obliged to”). More at mote.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗mustEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
From Middle English must, from Old English must and Old French must, most, both from Latin mustum.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗mustEnglish (en) · Etymology 3Source text
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, 2024010
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
No reviewed record in this collection contains “must.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
020
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
No reviewed record in this collection contains “must.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
037
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 6
resolvedestablisheddispute-title prefix
Must decimate mean only kill one in ten?
No. That was its earliest English historical sense, but drastic reduction and destruction have been established since the seventeenth century.
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Must an etymon be the deepest reconstructable root?
No. Merriam-Webster defines it as an earlier same-language or ancestral form, a foreign loan source, or a word or morpheme used in composition or derivation.
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Must a French étymon be directly attested?
No. Both CNRTL and the Académie explicitly define the explanatory form as attested or reconstructed/hypothetical.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does English friend define what Old Norse frændi must mean?
No. Cognates can diverge semantically. OED explicitly contrasts West Germanic friend with Scandinavian relative, and ONP documents the Old Norse distribution directly.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does the six-cell table preserve the complete Old Dutch paradigm?
No. It attests nominative and genitive singular plus nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative plural. Unrecorded cells must not be invented.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does the 901–1000 corpus range prove when vijand was coined?
No. It is the oldest attestation range published by ONW, not a birth certificate. The inherited formation must predate the daughter-language record, and the surviving sources are incomplete.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 1
RANK 52GRADE Aranked reveal
Friend and fiend are grammatical twins—but not cognates.
OED analyzes friend as a noun use of the present participle behind the Germanic free and love family, and it explicitly calls fiend a similar formation. Bosworth–Toller makes the Old English structure visible: freónd is the loving participle of freón, to free or love. The enemy word follows a different hate verb. The real unveiling is structural: one inherited agent noun is the loving one, the other the hating one or enemy, and parallel grammar must not be mistaken for one root splitting into moral opposites.
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BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “must.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
050
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “must.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
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.