GRAPH-WIDE SEARCH
MEASURE THE GRAPH ↗NOT JUST A DICTIONARY LOOKUP
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 LOCAL3 source sections across 1 headword matching “We”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
weEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *wéyder. Proto-Germanic *wīz Proto-West Germanic *wiʀ Old English wē Middle English we English we From Middle English we, from Old English wē (“we”), from Proto-West Germanic *wiʀ, from Proto-Germanic *wīz, *wiz (“we”), from Proto-Indo-European *wéy (“we (plural)”). Cognate with Scots wee, we (“we”), North Frisian we (“we”), West Frisian wy (“we”), Low German wi (“we”), Dutch we, wij (“we”), German wir (“we”), Danish, Swedish and Norwegian vi (“we”), Icelandic vér, við (“we”), Avestan 𐬬𐬀𐬉𐬨 (vaēm), Sanskrit वयम् (vayám).
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗weEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *wéyder. Proto-Germanic *wīz Proto-West Germanic *wiʀ Old English wē Middle English we English we From Middle English we, from Old English wē (“we”), from Proto-West Germanic *wiʀ, from Proto-Germanic *wīz, *wiz (“we”), from Proto-Indo-European *wéy (“we (plural)”). Cognate with Scots wee, we (“we”), North Frisian we (“we”), West Frisian wy (“we”), Low German wi (“we”), Dutch we, wij (“we”), German wir (“we”), Danish, Swedish and Norwegian vi (“we”), Icelandic vér, við (“we”), Avestan 𐬬𐬀𐬉𐬨 (vaēm), Sanskrit वयम् (vayám).
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗weEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
Case extension of nominative we, used in the objective case in Tyneside English.
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
adverb
A grammatical class commonly modifying verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, phrases, clauses, or sentences; the English term continues Latin adverbium.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗proverb
A brief traditional saying or maxim; English received the word through Anglo-French from Latin proverbium.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verb
A grammatical word class expressing action, occurrence, or state; English borrowed the label through Anglo-French from Latin verbum.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verbal
Of, relating to, or consisting of words; also of verbs and, in one modern contrast, spoken rather than written.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verbatim
In exactly the same words; English borrowed the Medieval Latin adverb verbatim, built on verbum and -atim.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗word
A meaningful spoken or written unit; an inherited English form whose Germanic branch is cognate with Latin verbum rather than borrowed from it.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗-rīx
An attested Gaulish second member meaning “king” or “prince,” visible in compound personal names such as Dumnorix and Vercingetorix and inherited from Proto-Celtic *rīx-s.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗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 ↗Liebe
The German noun for love, inherited through Middle and Old High German and a Germanic abstract-noun formation distinct from the immediate noun ancestry of English love.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
*wer-dho-
something spoken; word
- DATE
- Proto-Indo-European suffixed full grade
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 5
*wer-³
to perceive; watch out for
- DATE
- Proto-Indo-European root
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 0
*werh₁-
speak
- DATE
- Proto-Indo-European speaking root
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 6
Weib
woman; wife; increasingly discriminatory term
- DATE
- Modern German
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 0
weard
guardian; keeper
- DATE
- Old English
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 0
*ahtí•
dwell, dwelling, house
- DATE
- Proto-Siouan prehistory
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
*bhōw-
to live; dwell
- DATE
- Proto-Indo-European lengthened o-grade
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
*bōwan
to dwell; live
- DATE
- Proto-Germanic
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
*hezzen
a reconstructed weak verb meaning chase or persecute
- DATE
- reconstructed Old High German bridge
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
*htí
dwell; dwelling root
- DATE
- Proto-Mississippi Valley Siouan
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
*katsi-
a proposed Celtic formation compared with Middle Irish cais and Old Welsh cas
- DATE
- proposed Proto-Celtic
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
*kʷetwóres
four
- DATE
- c. 4500–2500 BCE
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
Were hazzēn and hazzōn separate unrelated verbs?
That is not established. Dictionaries group both forms under the history of hassen, while corpus-wide scholarship shows that ēn verbs can acquire ōn double forms. The exact relationship for this lexeme still requires token-level paradigm study.
Were Roman calculations literally made with stones?
Latin calculus did name a pebble used on a counting board, and the computation sense developed from that practice.
Were the medieval and early-modern witness objects directly inspected?
No. This review inspected dictionary records and a scanned etymological dictionary page, not the Skåne-Lagen manuscript, Söderwall’s underlying medieval objects, or the cited early-modern print pages.
Were the underlying manuscript objects directly inspected?
No. This review inspected dictionaries, concordance metadata, and normalized text surfaces, not the manuscripts behind the three poems.
Were the underlying manuscript objects directly inspected?
No. This review inspected AWB records and Sievers's digitized text-edition page, not the Tatian, Ludwigslied, Otfrid, or Notker manuscript objects.
Were any underlying manuscript objects directly inspected for this dossier?
No. This review inspected the ONW article and its expanded source-reported records, not the Wachtendonck Psalms copies, Leiden Willeram codex, Groningen gloss object, or rhymed-text witnesses.
Were the underlying manuscript objects directly inspected?
No. This review inspected the official dictionary article, not the manuscripts behind its gloss and rule-text references.
Were the Behaim examples directly inspected in a manuscript?
No. They are located reports in DWB. Browser permissions blocked the available digitized editions during this review, so neither a manuscript nor printed edition object is promoted as directly inspected.
Were English love and hate once the same word?
No reviewed evidence connects English love directly to English hate. Middle Irish cais has an ambivalent love-and-hatred field inside a disputed comparison, but that is not a genealogical edge between the English words.
Were the Munich hatan and hatandiero readings directly inspected?
Yes. Full-resolution MDZ images of Cgm 25 scans 45 and 142 were visually checked against the line-level transcription and dictionary inventory.
Were the Cotton haton, hettendero, and hatoda readings directly inspected?
No. Köbler reports the C readings and Biblissima supplies manuscript identity and dating, but their exact folio pixels were not located and inspected in this review.
Were the Cotton, Vatican, Genesis, and Saxon Confession objects directly inspected?
No. Their readings are source-reported through Köbler or the Academy dictionary; no exact primary-object pixels were inspected for those four rows.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
Evidence became a thread you could follow.
Old English cliewen was a ball of thread; the labyrinth metaphor turned it into guidance through uncertainty.
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.
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.
Humiliation is evidenced in English before humiliate.
Chaucer’s Middle English humiliacioun occurs in a humility passage; Merriam-Webster reports the English verb humiliate only circa 1534. Christian Latin and French preserve lowering, abasement, mortification, and self-humbling before current definitions center degradation, disgrace, and shame.
-logy never simply meant “the study of.”
The bound form’s recorded range includes expression and discourse as well as doctrine, theory, science, and study. Its trail reaches Greek logos—word, speech, account, reckoning, reason—rather than a prehistoric word meaning “science.”
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.
Hate was enemy-directed action as well as feeling in Old English.
Old English hatian could mean treating as an enemy, persecuting, or injuring; Beowulf puts the verb beside hostile deeds. The deeper claim that pursuit was the first meaning remains open, and the graph says so.
Old English hated vices and deeds as well as people.
Bosworth–Toller’s Pastoral Care examples make conduct grammatical: rulers hate their subjects’ vices, and the text distinguishes loving what enemies are from hating what they do. The historical verb therefore records directed moral and hostile judgment, not only an inward emotion label.
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.
The Devil entered English as the Enemy—and the enemy was a fossilized hater.
OED’s revised history identifies fiend as an inherited Germanic noun made from the present participle of the hate verb. Old English fēond meant enemy and foe as well as Devil; OED explains Satan as the ultimate Enemy and marks the literal enemy sense obsolete after the medieval period. Cotton MS Vitellius A XV still visibly preserves feondes in a concrete foe’s-footprint scene at Beowulf 2289.
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.
Old High German fīant was already a noun—but in fixed phrases its old participial character could still shine through.
AWB calls fîant / fîjant a strong masculine noun, then isolates fixed formulas where its old participial character can still shine through. Fîant uuesan could mean be hostile, hate someone, or wish someone ill; fîant mahhôn meant make hostile; zi fîante tuon could mean regard as an enemy or hate. Beside it, AWB records the live weak verb fîên, to hate, in eighth- and ninth-century Alemannic manuscripts. The word is therefore more revealing than a simple literal gloss: it is a lexicalized noun whose older verbal architecture remained locally visible in syntax.
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
Kapu — Nā Puke Wehewehe ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi
Lorrin Andrews et al. / 1836
citation-key prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Weib — Rechtschreibung, Bedeutung, Definition, Herkunft
Duden Editors / 2026
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Hate — definition, etymology, and first known use
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Lemma fijan — Gothic dictionary and 42-token candidate inventory
Project Wulfila editors · Wilhelm Streitberg / 2026
publisherAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Celto-Germanic — HATRED *kad-
John T. Koch / 2020
publisherAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Lemma fijands — Gothic enemy noun and 26-token candidate inventory
Project Wulfila editors · Wilhelm Streitberg / 2026
publisherAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Had a Long Day of Travel? Check Into a Hospital
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2017
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Check — Word History
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Science — Word History
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Guest — Word History
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Calculus — Word History and Etymology Note
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗Wife — Definition and Word History
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
John Harris’s NOTES in Musick entry describes a fixed group of six select syllables formerly used to distinguish degrees of sound.
select / select / 1704
Lexicon technicum: or, an universal English dictionary of arts and scienceswitness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗Old English gecynde passage reported by Loureiro-Porto
cynd / gecynd / kind / circa 888 passage reported from Alfred’s Boethius
Pragmatic Markers in World Englishes: Kind of and Sort of as a Case in Pointwitness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗Old English lexical record
cliewen / clue / Old English period
Bosworth–Toller: cliewenreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Merriam-Webster first-known-use report
bride / bride / before the 12th century
Bride — Definition, Word History, and First Known Usereporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Resignation of the World, hating crimes
fēogan / fēogan / Old English, source-reported
Bosworth–Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary — FEÓGANwitness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗Psalm, hating unjust ways
fēogan / fēogan / Old English, source-reported
Bosworth–Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary — FEÓGANwitness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗Merriam-Webster first-known-use record for king
king / king / before the 12th century
King — definition, etymology, and first known usereporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Merriam-Webster first-known-use record for kin
kin / kin / before the 12th century
Kin — definition, etymology, and first known usereporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Merriam-Webster first-known-use record for kind as a noun
kind / kind / before the 12th century
Kind — definition, etymology, and first known usereporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Merriam-Webster first-known-use record for kindred as a noun
kindred / kindred / before the 12th century
Kindred — definition, etymology, and first known usereporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Merriam-Webster report of kynrædan
cynræden / cynrēde / kindred / late Old English, unique inflected form
Kindred — definition, etymology, and first known usereporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗Merriam-Webster first-known-use record for hate as a verb
hate / hate / before the 12th century
Hate — definition, etymology, and first known usereporting 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.