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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 LOCAL3 source sections across 1 headword matching “Real”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
realEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *(H)reh₁-der. Proto-Indo-European *(H)reh₁ís Proto-Italic *reis Classical Latin rēs Proto-Indo-European *h₂el- Proto-Indo-European *-is Proto-Indo-European *h₂élisder.? Proto-Italic *-ālis Latin -ālis Late Latin reālisder. Old French reelbor. Middle English real English real From Middle English real, from Old French reel, from Late Latin reālis (“actual”), from Latin rēs (“matter, thing”), from Proto-Indo-European *reh₁ís (“wealth, goods”). Doublet of realis. In modern times, likely strengthened by or conflated with the use of the prefix re-, analyzable as re- + -al.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗realEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
Borrowed from Spanish real (“royal”), from Latin rēgālis (“regal, royal”). Doublet of ariary, regal, riyal, and royal.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗realEnglish (en) · Etymology 3Source text
From Portuguese real (“royal”), from Latin rēgālis (“regal; royal”). Doublet of ariary, regal, riyal, and royal.
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, 2024- RealMiddle English · word_real_adj_1
Real, adj. real, a term in medieval philosophy; reall, S3.—OF. real; Schol. Lat. realem, from res.
Read the full source record → - RealMiddle English · word_real_adj_2
Real, adj. royal, CM; riall, S3, PP, CM; ryall, S3, CM; ryell, S3; roial, CM; roialler, comp., S2, C3.—OF. real, AF. roial, reial; Lat. regalem.
Read the full source record →
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
realm
A kingdom, domain, or sphere; inherited through Middle English realme and Old French material ultimately from Latin regimen.
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 ↗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 ↗etymology
The study of the true or original sense of a word—and of the changes that made it what it is.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗etymon
A technical English noun for an earlier source form, a foreign donor, or a base used in composition or derivation.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗hatjan
A Gothic weak verb meaning hate, represented by exactly one verified corpus token: the present participle hatjandam in Matthew 5:44. Project Wulfila lemmatizes that token as class-I hatjan, while the parallel Luke 6:27 command uses class-III hatandans from hatan. Braune treats the two shapes as conjugational fluctuation; Orel and the current corpus keep distinct formations visible. The normalized infinitive, the written participle, and the reconstructed parent are therefore never collapsed.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗hatr
An Old Norse noun for hatred, enmity, or spite. The University of Copenhagen Dictionary of Old Norse Prose gives the main neuter entry 54 citations, while a separately analyzed masculine entry has only one citation and is flagged as possibly an elementary error. The neuter corpus also contains one cautiously proposed mockery or scorn sense aligned with Latin irrisio. A c.1150-1200 manuscript visibly preserves Hatr in a line ONP transcribes Hatr hafa þeir engla and aligns with Latin Odium. The reviewed ancestry joins the Germanic *hatiz- family, preserves the disputed *ḱh₂d-es- and *ḱeh₂d- comparison, and then stops.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗salt
Common salt and the wider family of saline substances and figurative savor; an inherited Germanic word in a deep Indo-European salt family.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
realm
kingdom, domain, or sphere
- DATE
- 13th century–today
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 1
realme
kingdom, governed domain
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 1
*set-eu-o-
having or containing true order; real
- DATE
- Proto-Indo-European adjectival formation, proposed
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
*set-u-
true; real; in true order
- DATE
- prehistoric
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 12
*setu-mo-
true, real
- DATE
- Proto-Indo-European formation, proposed
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 7
*stéu-gho-
real; certain
- DATE
- Proto-Indo-European Armenian preform, proposed
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
truth
conformity to fact or reality; sincerity; fidelity
- DATE
- before 12th century–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
ստոյգ
stoygtrue, just, certain, sure, real, authentic
- DATE
- Classical Armenian record–later Armenian
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
ἐτεός
eteósin accordance with truth; true; really
- DATE
- Homeric and later Ancient Greek
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
ἔτυμος
étymostrue, real, genuine
- DATE
- archaic Greek
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 3
ἔτυμος
étymostrue, real, actual; in the neuter, the true sense of a word
- DATE
- Archaic and later Ancient Greek
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 7
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
Is realm simply a shortened form of royal?
No. Realm descends through a government noun from Latin regimen, but its medieval form was altered under the influence of the royal adjective.
Did realm always mean any abstract sphere?
No. Its oldest reported English horizon is kingdom; sphere, domain, and biogeographic meanings are extensions.
Can one exact spoken pronunciation be recovered?
No recorded voice survives. The macron and grammatical spelling support a historical phonological analysis, but they do not license an audio-like exact realization.
Is hazzōn straightforwardly one class-II verb?
The ōn citation form has class-II morphology, but the historical record also preserves ēn forms associated with class III. Corpus-wide scholarship treats such double forms as a real Old High German problem rather than a typographic nuisance.
Is the bone-setting sense a fake folk story?
No. Arabic and Romance transmission includes reunion of broken parts and bone-setting. That real medical sense should not be confused with the mathematical title history.
Is collect really com- plus legere?
Yes. Latin colligere contains the assimilated together-prefix com- / col- and legere “gather, select.”
Is the Roman tenth-member story invented?
No. The Latin and historical punishment sense is real; the error is using etymology to ban later English meanings.
Is the “bad star” composition real?
Yes. Italian disastro is analyzed as a negative prefix plus astro “star,” reflecting an astrological frame for misfortune.
Does etymological mean correct because of a word’s origin?
No. Etymology is a word’s historical development, distinct from its current definition; origin does not legislate present meaning.
Does Holberg scansion reproduce ordinary speech exactly?
Not necessarily. It is evidence for metrical realization and variation, not audio or a complete social map of pronunciation.
Can the pronunciation of Old English frēond and Proto-Germanic *frijōnd- be heard exactly?
No. Historical phonology supports normalized approximations, not audio recordings or one recoverable dialect realization.
Was the Devil the central meaning of fīant?
No. AWB separates personal, public or military, spiritual, and specifically Devil senses. The demonic branch is real but not the whole noun.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
Royal reshaped realm.
Realm follows Latin regimen, government, through Old French reiame; American Heritage reports that its medieval form was altered under the influence of Old French reial, royal.
Etymology calls itself the “true account.”
Greek ἔτυμος “true, real” joined -λογία “account or study”; even that truth-word reaches a reconstructed root.
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.
Care, grief, funerals, and in-laws occupy one Greek noun—but hate does not secretly mean care.
LSJ's κῆδος entry moves through care and concern, anxiety and grief, troubles, mourning and funeral rites, an object of care, and connection by marriage. Homeric κήδεʼ can be many-troubled woes; Aeschylus can make Helen an object of care while playing on marriage affinity. Comparative sources then place the noun beside Celtic and Germanic hatred words under *ḱh₂d-es- and *ḱeh₂d-. The reveal is not a mystical reversal in which hate “really” means care. Merriam-Webster calls the semantic relations far from transparent, Liberman challenges the wider family's unity, and the Greek evidence itself resists a single linear story.
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.
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.
Medieval Hass could be friendly competition.
Grimm’s DWB quotes Erec 2059: riders pursue a hawking contest, friuntlîchen striten, and share a bescheiden haʒ. The dictionary interprets this as rivalry in pursuing a goal. Modern Duden instead centers intense aversion and hostility. The contrast reveals a real historical side meaning without claiming that every medieval use was friendly or that Liebe and Hass share ancestry.
German hassen has an action buried under the feeling.
Duden says Middle High German haʒʒen and Old High German haʒʒēn / haʒʒōn formerly also meant pursue. Grimm’s DWB goes further: it calls hostile pursuit or persecution the original sense, reports Old High German following or pursuit alignments and Behaim persecution contexts, then explicitly describes the later sense as more about hostile disposition than hostile deeds. Modern Duden centers hatred and strong aversion. The contrast is real; the one certain prehistoric scene is not.
The Indigenous route is real scholarship—but not a closed case.
English securely borrowed Louisiana French bayouque. Early Choctaw *bayok is plausible, while the oft-repeated bayuk form and its contraction to modern bók remain insecure.
The viral “it means testicle” story overclaims a real fact.
Nahuatl āhuacatl is documented with both avocado and testicle senses. The dictionaries establish polysemy and transmission through Spanish—not which sense named the other.
“True” is not yet “etymology.”
Greek ἔτυμος meant true, real, or actual. A neuter technical noun and then the compound ἐτυμολογία had to turn truth into an inquiry about words.
The etymon is not always the root of the root.
In technical use an etymon may be an earlier form, a foreign loan source, or a derivational word or morpheme—not necessarily the deepest reachable ancestor.
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
Realm — American Heritage Dictionary
American Heritage Dictionary Editors / 2022
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Realm — Definition, Word History, and First Known Use
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Aguacate — Diccionario de la lengua española
Real Academia Española · Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española / 2024
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Poncho — Diccionario de la lengua española
Real Academia Española and ASALE Editors / 2026
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Hamaca — Diccionario de la lengua española
Real Academia Española · Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española / 2024
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Llama — Diccionario de la lengua española
Real Academia Española and ASALE Editors / 2026
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Alpaca — Diccionario de la lengua española
Real Academia Española and ASALE Editors / 2026
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
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.