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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 “Whos” 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, 2024Whos
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Read the complete entry and references ↗ · Contribute a cited dossier
0112
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
noundossier summary
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 ↗noundossier summary
algebra
A mathematical discipline whose English name travels through Medieval Latin from Arabic al-jabr, restoration or completion.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verb · noundossier summary
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 ↗noundossier summary
chess
The board game whose English name arrives through French chess vocabulary, with competing scholarly accounts of the deeper Persian and Arabic route.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗adjective · nouncontrarian claim
conscious
Aware, awake, or deliberate; borrowed directly from Latin conscius in the knowing-family.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noundossier summary
disaster
A catastrophe whose name preserves an astrological model of misfortune: an unfavorable star.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗adjectivedossier summary
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 ↗English noundossier summary
fiend
An inherited English noun whose earliest recorded sense was enemy or foe, not demon. Old English fēond belonged to a Germanic lexicalized one-who-hates formation; Middle English fẹ̄nd preserved enemy, Satan, demon, possession, and monster senses across extensive spelling variation; modern fiend continues the same English line. OED’s revised 2026 entry marks the literal enemy sense obsolete after the medieval record, explains the Devil as the ultimate Enemy, and documents long-versus-short vowel competition before the long vowel became dominant by the eighteenth century. The Middle English Dictionary independently exposes 188 quotations across eight senses without claiming a complete corpus.
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 ↗Old English verbcontrarian claim
fēogan
An Old English verb meaning hate or persecute, recorded as FEÓGAN, feógean, fiógan, contracted feón and fión, with participle feógende and a broad present-and-past paradigm. Bosworth–Toller supplies examples whose objects include crimes, evil ways, law, peace, a temple, friends, and people. The verb continues reconstructed Proto-Germanic *fi(j)ēn-. Its active-participial formation lexicalized prehistorically as the enemy noun behind Old English fēond and modern fiend, but the verb, participle, and noun are not one interchangeable category.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗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 High German weak verbdossier summary
fīēn
Old High German fīēn—printed fîên in the Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch—was a weak verb meaning to hate, not love, be hostile to, detest, or reject. The official dictionary says it is attested only in Alemannic manuscripts of the eighth and ninth centuries, then inventories an infinitive fien, present participle fiendi, second-person singular preterite fietos, and accusative plural masculine past participle fieta. Three rule-text records concern hating discipline, one’s own will, or no person; gloss records align the participial forms with Latin exosus or exosos; and an Esther gloss aligns fien with detestari. These are source-reported edition and dictionary records, not directly inspected manuscript objects, and the broad manuscript horizon does not identify one exact first token. A separate twelfth-century article printed fien [sic] with the gloss ubere is explicitly left uninterpreted by the dictionary and is not merged into this hate verb. Beside the verb, Old High German had the already lexicalized enemy noun fīant, whose old participial character could still shine through in fixed phrases. The graph therefore shows a living daughter verb beside a grammatical fossil without pretending that either attested form is the reconstructed Proto-Germanic word itself. No historical sound recording exists and the dossier does not display a fabricated phonetic certainty.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗020
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
No reviewed record in this collection contains “whos.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
0316
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
openproposedposition text
Is the deepest *peh₁- route established?
No. The Germanic verb and lexicalized agent formation are firmer than the proposed Indo-European comparison, whose formal intermediates and semantic unity remain reconstructive.
openproposedposition text
Is the deepest *peh₁- route established?
No. The Germanic verb and lexicalized agent formation are firmer than the proposed Indo-European comparison, whose formal intermediates and semantic unity remain reconstructive.
openproposedposition text
Does *fi(j)and- securely descend from *peh₁-?
Only through the proposed deeper analysis of its Germanic verb base. The lexicalized participle-to-verb relation is stronger than the Indo-European route, whose intermediate morphology and semantic unity remain reconstructive.
openproposedposition text
Is the deepest *peh₁- route established?
No. The Germanic verb comparison is firmer than the proposed Indo-European analysis, whose formal intermediates and semantic unity remain reconstructive.
openproposedposition text
Is the deepest *peh₁- route established?
No. The Germanic verb and lexicalized agent formation are firmer than the proposed Indo-European comparison, whose formal intermediates and semantic unity remain reconstructive.
openproposedposition text
Does fīunt securely descend from exactly *peh₁-?
Only as a qualified proposal. The Germanic noun-and-verb relationship is firmer than the displayed Indo-European route, whose notation and semantic framing vary.
openproposedposition text
Does hata securely descend from exactly *ḱeh₂d-?
Only as a qualified proposal. The Germanic comparison is firmer than the displayed Indo-European route, whose semantic members are far from transparent.
openproposedposition text
Does hatia securely descend from exactly *ḱeh₂d-?
Only as a qualified proposal. The Germanic comparison is firmer than the displayed Indo-European route, whose semantic members are far from transparent.
openprobableposition text
Does hatizōn securely descend from *ḱeh₂d-?
Only through the noun family’s qualified proposal. The Germanic derivation from hatis is firmer than the deeper comparison, whose grief, care, mourning, love, hatred, and anger fields do not form one transparent sequence.
openestablishedposition text
Is *kʷē̆d- / *kʷō̆d- a securely attested prehistoric word?
No. It is a Pokorny etymon adapted in a comparative database whose pages are explicitly under active construction. Its link to hōti is a published proposal.
openproposedposition text
Did the Devil preserve vijand’s full ending?
Possibly, not certainly. Van Veen, De Vries, Van Haeringen, and EWN repeat variants of the proposal that medieval Devil usage made vijand a church or consecrated term whose full ending resisted the reduction seen in vriend. Their wording is maybe or probably.
openproposedposition text
Is κῆδος derived from κήδω, or is the verb derived from the noun?
LSJ parenthetically links κῆδος with κήδω, whose active and middle-passive senses span distress and care, but the located entry does not fully argue one diachronic direction.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 4
RANK 38GRADE Aranked reveal
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.
RANK 41GRADE Aranked reveal
The enemy fossil and the living hate verb coexisted in Old High German.
AWB records fîên as a weak verb only in eighth- and ninth-century Alemannic manuscripts, but the pocket preserves an infinitive, present participle, preterite, and past participle across hate, hostility, detestation, and rejection. Beside it, fîant was already a strong masculine enemy noun whose old participial character could still shine through in fixed phrases. Old High German therefore preserves both sides of the history at once: the live verbal family and the noun already lexicalized from it. The evidence reveals a grammatical relationship, not the psychology of every enemy and not a securely recovered Proto-Indo-European essence.
RANK 54GRADE Aranked reveal
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.
RANK 138GRADE Branked reveal
The Devil may have preserved the second syllable of Dutch vijand.
The solid layer is already strange: vijand is a fossilized present participle, literally one who hates. The speculative layer is stranger. EWN, Van Veen, De Vries, and Van Haeringen propose that medieval use for the Devil made vijand a church or consecrated term whose full ending resisted the reduction seen in vriend. VMNW proves the Devil sense was real with repeated thirteenth-century records. It does not prove the phonological cause. The correct reveal is may have preserved, not did preserve.
040
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “whos.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
050
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “whos.” 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.