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6 EVIDENCE COLLECTIONSSEARCH
THE GRAPH.
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 LOCALNo exact match for “Spec” in this partial English subset. That does not mean the full research corpus—or linguistic scholarship—has no record. Check the original dictionary entry ↗
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, 2024Spec
No extractable etymology was found for this exact spelling. Open the original dictionary entry ↗
Read the complete entry and references ↗ · Contribute a cited dossier
0112
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
Middle Irish noundossier summary
cais
eDIL separates two Irish headwords written cais. The first, also recorded as caise, is explicitly explained both as love and as hate; its cited passages and glossary equations range from searc and grádh "love" to miscais and mioscais "hatred", with context deciding individual readings. One Éigse line is tentatively translated so that the same visible form occurs on both sides: "my love ... is met by hatred(?)". The question mark matters. The second eDIL headword cais means "eye" and is excluded from this semantic lineage. These records establish a remarkable lexicographic opposition, not one timeless essence, a chronology from love to hate, or proof that every occurrence belongs to one historically indivisible sense. John T. Koch compares the noun with Proto-Celtic *katsi- < *kad-t/si- and a wider *kad- family, but that ancestry and its proposed Germanic comparison remain open. eDIL itself generally supplies etymologies only selectively. No manuscript pixels were directly inspected, no earliest-use or historical-frequency claim is made, and no exact pronunciation is invented.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounhistorical form
calculator
A person or device that calculates, inherited from a medieval human-reckoner word and the Latin counting-pebble family.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verb · nounhistorical form
check
To verify, restrain, mark, or issue a bank draft today; a word whose oldest English history begins with a threatened king in chess.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
etymologist
A specialist in etymology; an English agent noun formed on etymology with -ist.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Swedish common-gender noundossier summary
fiende
The ordinary Swedish noun for an enemy, opponent, hostile state, or figurative threat continues Old Swedish fiande or fiände and an inherited Germanic present-participial formation: literally the hating one. Svenska Akademiens current dictionary calls the word Common Germanic and gives the original force hatande; SAOB and Hellquist independently derive the noun from the fi(j)- hate verb behind Gothic fijan and Old Norse fjá. Modern Swedish hata belongs to a separate Germanic hat- family, so fiende is not transparently built from the verb Swedish speakers now use for hate. Historical Swedish also used Fienden for the Devil, but that branch is not the word’s only or current central meaning. All medieval and early-modern examples here are source-reported lexical records, not directly inspected manuscript objects.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Gothic masculine nd-stem common noundossier summary
fijands
A Gothic masculine nd-stem noun conventionally glossed enemy. Project Wulfila currently exposes 26 candidates: three verified noun assignments, two further noun-only assignments, and 21 surface forms also listed under the living verb fijan. Ayora Estevan explains the collision diachronically: Proto-Germanic had already lexicalized the present-participial *fi(j)and- as enemy, while Gothic retained productive one-who-hates participles beside the noun. The five noun-only candidates use fiand, fijands, fijande, and fijandis; all five were inspected in Codex Argenteus facsimiles.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Danish common-gender noundossier summary
fjende
Modern Danish fjende is the ordinary noun for a person, state, force, ideological opponent, or figurative thing that harms something else. Den Danske Ordbog derives it from Old Norse fjándi, compares German Feind, and identifies the older formation as a present participle of a verb corresponding to Old Norse fjá, to hate or persecute. Gammeldansk Ordbog records fiende broadly from 1100–1300. Ordbog over det danske Sprog preserves fiende, finde, and related spellings, an ordinary enemy sense, military and animal uses, abstract threats, and a special religious Devil branch. Holbergordbog shows that Fiende could still scan as either three syllables or two, alongside Fiænde, Finde, Fînde, and clipped Fiend. The word is therefore a grammatical fossil, not a current psychological definition: a lexicalized one-who-hates became the ordinary Danish enemy noun and accumulated broad contextual work. The current pronunciations are dictionary records, not retrojections into medieval Danish. No manuscript or print object is claimed as directly inspected.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Norse verbdossier summary
fjá
Old Norse fjá was a verb meaning to hate. The Dictionary of Old Norse Prose classifies it as poetic and exposes zero prose citations; its glossarium links point to the early form fía and the reconstructed Proto-Germanic *fi(j)ēn-. Cleasby and Vigfússon call the verb obsolete, compare Gothic fijan and Old English feon or fjan, and locate it in Hýmiskviða 22 and Lokasenna 35, with the reflexive fjásk in Skírnismál 33. Fritzner independently gives the same three locations. The normalized verse texts preserve three different grammatical surfaces: goð fjá in Hýmiskviða, mangi fíár in Lokasenna, and Freyr fiásk in Skírnismál. Lexicon Poeticum likewise reports three poetic records, but explicitly warns that its concordance is unreviewed and that dates should be checked. These are source-reported lexical and edited-text records, not directly inspected manuscript objects, and three records in the reviewed poetic concordance are not a census of every Old Norse utterance. The finite verb became a tiny poetic fossil while its inherited participial relative fjándi became the ordinary enemy noun and accumulated 222 citations in ONP's prose corpus. Those corpus totals are not directly frequency-comparable, but the contrast makes the grammatical survival visible. The generated possible runic inscription shown by modern dictionary transcriptions is not historical evidence and is excluded. No historical sound recording exists, so the dossier does not fabricate one exact pronunciation.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Norse masculine noundossier summary
fjándi
Old Norse fjándi is a masculine noun whose inherited shape still exposes a prehistoric agent formation. Cleasby and Vigfússon compare Gothic fiands, Old English feond, German Feind, Swedish fiende, and Danish fjende, identify the nd as participial, and gloss the older formation as properly a hater. They then distinguish the ordinary enemy sense from a post-Christian fiend development. The University of Copenhagen Dictionary of Old Norse Prose supplies 222 citations and six semantic zones: enemy or opponent; devil, monster, or demon; evil spirit; pagan god; the Devil or Satan; and a derogatory term for a hated or bewitched person, animal, or object. Lexicon Poeticum independently exposes 49 poetic records, including source-reported tenth-century enemy uses and later Christian fiend uses, while warning that its concordance and dates require checking. The noun therefore does not possess one timeless true meaning: an inherited lexicalized hater became an ordinary enemy word, and the branch later accumulated several demonic and derogatory senses. The displayed pronunciation is an editorial normalized approximation, not recorded historical audio. No underlying manuscript object is claimed as directly inspected in this dossier.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗English common noun and historical adjectivehistorical form
friend
English friend continues Middle English frẹ̄nd and Old English frēond, an inherited Germanic nd-stem agent noun. OED identifies cognates across West, East, and North Germanic and analyzes them as noun uses of a present participle of the Germanic base behind free; Bosworth–Toller explicitly calls Old English freónd the participle of freón, a verb meaning free or love; American Heritage independently explains the formation as originally one who loves. The historical noun later covers intimate companion, ally, supporter, relation, lover, form of address, Quaker, climbing device, and social-network contact. The graph displays a normalized *frijōnd- participial formation, Germanic *frī-, the proposed Indo-European comparison *prī-, and then stops.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Norse masculine noundossier summary
frændi
Old Norse frændi belongs to the same inherited Germanic present-participial family as English friend, German Freund, and Dutch vriend, but cognacy did not freeze one meaning. The Dictionary of Old Norse Prose structures 225 citations into friend; foster brother or companion; kinsman, relative, or son; parents; and ancestor, while warning that the friend and kin divisions are not sharp. Cleasby and Vigfússon call the Scandinavian semantic specialization striking and treat kinsman as the ordinary center; Zoëga likewise gives kinsman, brother, son, and ancestor. Fritzner preserves the historical formation as a participle of frjá and compares the West and East Germanic friend words. The graph joins frændi directly to the same reviewed *frijōnd-, *frī-, and proposed *prī- nodes as friend, Freund, and vriend, then stops. The displayed pronunciation is a normalized approximation, not recorded medieval audio.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old English strong masculine nd-stem noundossier summary
frēond
Old English frēond is the directly attested source-language noun behind modern friend. OED analyzes it as an inherited strong masculine agent noun in -nd, ultimately a noun use of the present participle of the Germanic base behind free, and documents West Saxon frēond, Northumbrian and Kentish frīond, Kentish frīand, mutated frīend and frȳnd, endingless plurals, and re-formed frēondas. Bosworth–Toller prints freónd and friónd, explicitly links freónde loving to freón or freógan, and supplies examples for companion, ally, relation, friend of God, friend versus foe, and friends acting as arbitrators. OED independently preserves close companion, non-enemy, ally, and kinsman senses in Old English. Cotton MS Vitellius A XV folio 152r was directly inspected at Beowulf 1018, where the pixels visibly preserve freondum in Heorot innan wæs freondum afylled. The route reuses the reviewed *frijōnd-, *frī-, and proposed *prī- nodes and then stops. The displayed pronunciation is a normalized approximation, not a recorded voice.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗0212
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
*
Proto-Indo-European / Indo-European
*mūs-
mouse; also the family behind specialized muscle words
- DATE
- Proto-Indo-European prehistory
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 4
Present-Day English / Indo-European
-ist
one who does, makes, practices, or specializes in
- DATE
- English, 16th century–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 0
Present-Day English / Indo-European
calculator
one who calculates; later especially a calculating machine or electronic device
- DATE
- 14th century–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
check
verify, restrain, inspect, mark; a bank draft
- DATE
- 14th century–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
etymologist
a specialist in etymology
- DATE
- 1604–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
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
Old Norse / Indo-European
frændi
friend or companion; especially kinsman, relative, son, parent, or ancestor
- DATE
- Old Norse poetic and prose record
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Tupi / Tupian
jawára / jaguara
large carnivore; a broader predator label than the modern English species term
- DATE
- Tupi
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Middle English / Indo-European
kīnde
essential nature, origin, family, species, class, sex, manner, or the created order
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Quechua source (variety unspecified) / Quechuan
llama
llama; Lama glama
- DATE
- Quechua historical and modern record
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Inuit source (variety unspecified) / Eskimo-Aleut
qayaq
kayak; traditional narrow skin-covered watercraft
- DATE
- Inuit source form; variety unspecified
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
science
systematic knowledge, especially knowledge tested through scientific method
- DATE
- 19th century–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
0324
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
openprobableposition text
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.
openprobableposition text
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.
openproposedposition text
Does boy securely descend from a word for ox hide?
No. American Heritage offers a possible chain through a fettered person, fetter, Latin restraint collar, and Greek ox hide; Oxford labels the origin unknown.
openprobableposition text
What is the earliest surviving use of cais in either sense?
Not established here. eDIL supplies located citations but the underlying objects and dates were not normalized or directly inspected for an earliest-use audit.
openprobableposition text
Was Portuguese chá borrowed specifically from Cantonese or from Mandarin?
WALS gives a Cantonese cha route through Macao; Infopédia labels the source Mandarin chá. The shared cha-type Chinese family is secure, but the immediate variety label is not unanimous.
openproposedposition text
Are the prayer and gathering senses identical histories?
They converge on Latin collēctus / colligere, but the prayer noun may refer specifically to a congregation’s gathering place; the immediate motivation is qualified as “perhaps.”
openprobableposition text
Was emotion first used in the 1570s or exactly 1579?
Etymonline gives the decade; Merriam-Webster gives 1579. These are compatible levels of precision, not proof of one first utterance.
openproposedposition text
Can the movement family be pushed securely beyond *meue-?
Not from the reviewed evidence. Etymonline publishes *meue- for the movement root, but this dossier does not promote an older form without specialist comparative review.
openprobableposition text
Does the English record begin in 1588 or the 1590s?
The reports differ slightly: Merriam-Webster gives 1588 and Etymonline gives the 1590s. Neither date proves the word was coined then.
openprobableposition text
Does the specialist title begin in 1604 or the 1630s?
Merriam-Webster reports 1604; Etymonline reports the 1630s. These are different source horizons, not necessarily irreconcilable claims about the same underlying object.
openprobableposition text
Did every early fīend- form arise from inherited i-mutation?
Not necessarily. OED notes that especially in early Mercian, some apparently mutated stems may instead have been re-formed after the present participle of fēon.
openestablishedposition text
What is the exact earliest surviving Danish fjende token?
Not established by the inspected public evidence. Gammeldansk Ordbog reports fiende as known since 1100–1300 but exposes no exact first token on the entry page.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
RANK 11GRADE Aranked reveal
It was never humanity’s universal ancient name for spiritual practitioners.
English globalized a specific Evenki term through European scholarship and applied it to many unrelated traditions.
RANK 31GRADE Aranked reveal
Gothic’s two hate verbs trade places across two passages.
The complete surviving hatan corpus contains only hatandane in Luke 1:71 and hatandans in Luke 6:27. In Luke 1, fijandam supplies enemies while hatandane supplies those hating; in Luke 6, hatandans supplies enemies while fijandam supplies those hating. Both Codex Argenteus pages are directly inspected. The lexical swap—and the class-III versus class-I dispute—cannot be represented by one timeless translation arrow.
RANK 33GRADE Aranked reveal
Enemy is a fossilized hater—but lexicalization does not make every token transparent.
Project Wulfila lists 26 candidates under the Gothic enemy noun and 42 under the verb fijan; exactly 21 surface tokens belong to both inventories. Ayora Estevan explains why: Proto-Germanic had already lexicalized one who hates as enemy, while Gothic retained the productive participle. The five noun-only tokens are directly inspected; the 21-token overlap remains public instead of being counted twice as certainty.
RANK 48GRADE Aranked reveal
Old Saxon hate crosses from verb into enemy noun inside one manuscript locus.
Köbler assigns hatōn four cited loci, but the evidence is not four neat tokens. Heliand 1451 alone varies between Munich hatan and Cotton haton. At Heliand 4915, Munich hatandiero and Cotton hettendero are indexed twice: under the verb as present-participial forms and under hėttiand as the lexicalized agent noun enemy. The Munich hatan and hatandiero pixels are directly inspected. The reveal is therefore grammatical, not mystical: one written formation sits at the boundary between haters and enemies. It does not prove that every enemy hates, that pursue was the first meaning, or that the four-locus dictionary count represents four manuscripts.
RANK 59GRADE A-ranked reveal
Old Norse hatr has a 54-to-1 grammar problem.
The University of Copenhagen’s Dictionary of Old Norse Prose separates a 54-citation neuter noun from a one-citation masculine analysis—and flags the lone masculine assignment as possibly an elementary error. A directly inspected c.1150-1200 manuscript visibly preserves Hatr, but a visible token cannot settle gender by itself. The reveal is not that Old Norse had two equally secure hate nouns; it is that rigorous lexicography preserves the fracture instead of hiding it.
RANK 66GRADE Aranked reveal
The borrowed name is part of the object’s history.
English kimchi directly continues Korean 김치; the graph refuses a deeper arrow until specialist evidence supports one.
RANK 68GRADE Acontrarian claim
The brand and species name began as a broader Indigenous predator word.
Portuguese carried Tupi jawára into English, where a broad large-carnivore label became the name of Panthera onca.
RANK 88GRADE Aranked reveal
Mussel and muscle were once spelling twins.
Middle English could spell the shellfish muscle. The shellfish and anatomical words ultimately belong to Latin’s mouse-derived musculus family, though the naming resemblance itself is not fully recoverable.
RANK 92GRADE Aranked reveal
Science originally meant knowledge.
Before the modern natural-science center, science could mean knowledge or an organized branch of learning. A directly inspected 1704 witness still prints that broader institutional sense.
RANK 94GRADE Aranked reveal
Chai is tea returning through another route.
The source-language forms behind English chai ordinarily mean tea. English specialized one returning member of the wider Chinese tea-word dispersal as a particular drink style.
RANK 97GRADE Aranked reveal
A verb was once any word.
Latin verbum could mean word, utterance, expression, language, or discourse before and beside its technical grammatical sense. English inherited the specialized label.
RANK 129GRADE Aranked reveal
Chthonic was an earth word before it was an underworld word.
Greek khthonios means of the earth, from khthōn, earth; infernal reference is a specialization of what lies beneath.
040
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “spec.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
053
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
DIRECTLY INSPECTEDprinted book
The PESTE entry in the first edition of the Académie française dictionary uses quarantaine for imposed isolation after travel from a place suspected of plague.
quarantaine / quarantine / 1694
Le dictionnaire de l'Académie française. Tome 2 (M–Z), première éditionreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗DIRECTLY INSPECTEDprinted book
John Harris’s FEE-FARM entry uses Legal to mark the specifically legal sense of the term.
legal / legal / 1704
Lexicon technicum: or, an universal English dictionary of arts and sciencesreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus
English prose works of Richard Rolle, selected edition
hatrede / hatreden / hateredyn / hatred / Middle English text, edition page 65
English prose works of Richard Rolle: a selectionwitness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗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.