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 LOCAL4 source sections across 2 headwords matching “lea”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
leaEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
From Middle English legh, lege, lei (“clearing, open ground”), from Old English lēah (“clearing in a forest”) from Proto-West Germanic *lauh (“meadow”), from Proto-Germanic *lauhaz (“meadow”), from Proto-Indo-European *lówkos (“field, meadow”). Akin to Old Frisian lāch (“meadow”), Old Saxon lōh (“forest, grove”) (Middle Dutch loo (“forest, thicket”); Dutch -lo (in placenames), Old High German lōh (“covered clearing, low bushes”), Old Norse ló (“clearing, meadow”).
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗leaEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
From Middle English le, lee, ley, of uncertain origin. Compare Old French lier (“to bind”), Old French laisse (“leash, cord”), Old French lïace, lïaz (“bundle”).
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗LeaEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
From Old English lēa, the dative case of lēah (“meadow”).
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗LeaEnglish (en) · Etymology 3Source text
Inherited from Old English Lyġe.
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.
Lewis’s Elementary Latin Dictionary
1890 American Book Company edition; pinned Perseus XML digitization0112
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
noun combining formhistorical form
-logy
A bound English word element used in formations involving discourse or expression and in names of doctrines, theories, sciences, and fields of study.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗onomastic compound elementhistorical form
-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 ↗nounhistorical form
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 ↗adjectivehistorical form
candid
Open or frank in modern English, inherited through French and Latin from a family of brightness and whiteness.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounhistorical form
candidate
A person seeking selection or office; ultimately the Roman office-seeker dressed in a bright white toga.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounhistorical form
candor
Frankness or honest expression, historically a word for brightness, radiance, whiteness, and unstained purity.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗adjectivedossier summary
chthonic
Of the underworld or of things in and under the earth; a learned English continuation of the Greek earth family.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounhistorical form
chá
The Portuguese word for tea, a European cha-type form associated with sixteenth-century Portuguese contact through Macao rather than the Dutch te-type route.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verb and adjectivecontrarian claim
direct
To guide, aim, command, or proceed without deviation or intermediary; continuing Latin dīrēctus and dīrigere through distinct medieval channels.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
etymologist
A specialist in etymology; an English agent noun formed on etymology with -ist.
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 ↗0212
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
*
Proto-Indo-European / Indo-European
*h₃reg-
move in a straight line; direct, lead, rule
- DATE
- Proto-Indo-European centum form
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 13
Proto-Indo-European / Indo-European
*h₃reg̑-
move in a straight line; direct, lead, rule
- DATE
- oldest published Proto-Indo-European form
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 13
Proto-Germanic / Indo-European
*leubaz
dear, beloved, pleasing
- DATE
- Proto-Germanic reconstruction
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 3
Latin / Indo-European
-logia
learned noun-forming element continuing Greek -logia
- DATE
- Latin and learned Latin
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Middle English / Indo-European
-logie
bound learned element visible in words such as etimologie
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Old French / Indo-European
-logie
learned noun-forming element transmitted into Middle English
- DATE
- Old French
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Latin / Indo-European
candidus
bright white; shining; clear
- DATE
- Latin antiquity
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 2
Portuguese / Indo-European
chá
tea plant, leaves, infusion, and related current senses
- DATE
- Portuguese record–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Old French / Indo-European
ethimologie
title reference, word explanation, or learned wordplay depending on the witness
- DATE
- Old French records from c. 1175
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
lesson
a unit of instruction or something learned
- DATE
- 13th century–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
German / Indo-European
lieb
dear, beloved, kind, pleasant, welcome
- DATE
- Present-day German
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Middle Dutch / Indo-European
lief
dear, beloved, pleasant
- DATE
- Middle Dutch
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
0324
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
openprobableposition text
Did -rīx mean exactly “king” in every compound name?
Not necessarily. The king or prince value is secure for the element, but scholarship distinguishes names where it is determinative from analyses in which it is semantically bleached or intensifying. Each host therefore requires its own compositional claim.
openprobableposition text
Is betroth built on truth or troth?
The historical base is Middle English trouth or trouthe, where the modern truth and troth spellings were not yet cleanly separated; mapping it to only one modern headword overstates the evidence.
openprobableposition text
Did English borrow candor only through French?
French candeur is a published route, while Merriam-Webster describes the English borrowing as French and Latin. Direct learned Latin influence therefore remains visible.
openprobableposition text
Did Arabic šāh pass directly into French?
The Arabic source is well supported, but Merriam-Webster leaves direct borrowing versus mediation through Spanish jaque unresolved.
openprobableposition text
Can the nd-ending alone distinguish enemy from one who hates?
No. The noun and productive participle share surface inflection. Case, complementation, agreement, and context resolve some passages, but Project Wulfila leaves 21 candidates lexically and morphosyntactically ambiguous.
openprobableposition text
Are there exactly three surviving Old Norse uses?
Three is the count in the reviewed public Lexicon Poeticum surface and matches the three locations in Cleasby and Fritzner, but it is not presented as a census of every lost or surviving utterance.
openestablishedposition text
Was fjá obsolete at one exact medieval date?
No. Cleasby calls the word obsolete from a nineteenth-century lexicographic perspective, but the reviewed record does not identify a last speaker or extinction year.
openspeculativeposition text
Why did kinship become central in Scandinavian?
Cleasby–Vigfússon and Fritzner propose social explanations involving strong family bonds and mutual obligation, but the textual distribution does not uniquely prove one causal event.
openprobableposition text
Does sem frændr en eigi sem fiandr prove the ordinary friend sense?
ONP files the phrase under friend but flags possible kin sense 3; Cleasby–Vigfússon treats it as a possible alliterative exception. The citation does not force one clean answer.
openproposedposition text
Was shun the original meaning of hata?
Not established. Cleasby and Vigfússon propose that the poetic dative shun sense was probably original, then immediately say hatta with double t may be the better reading.
openproposedposition text
Does hata gulli simply mean hate gold?
Not securely. Cleasby treats the dative phrase as spend gold, ONP has a separate prose contempt-for-gold record, and the poetic reading itself is questioned.
openprobableposition text
Why does Köbler print hatia with an asterisk while corpus forms are visible?
Köbler's sigla mark inferred or unattested representations inside his lexicographic system, while the later corpus surfaces inflected forms hatijen, hatie, hata, and hatien and one misleading hatia homograph. The exact source-base difference remains to be reconciled.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
RANK 7GRADE Aranked reveal
Nice crossed from ignorance to approval.
Latin nescius “ignorant” became foolish or wanton, then fastidious and precise, and finally pleasant or kind.
RANK 18GRADE Aranked reveal
The famous Gaulish ending is -rīx, not decorative -ix.
Cambridge identifies Gaulish -rix /-rīxs/ “king” inside Dumnorix and Vercingetorix and derives it from Proto-Celtic *rīx-s. The r belongs to the historical element; the exact force of that element still varies across individual names.
RANK 19GRADE Aranked reveal
The x of rēx is a whole nominative sound change in one letter.
Latin starts from the bound stem rēg-, adds nominative -s, devoices g to k, and writes the resulting /ks/ as x. Genitive rēgis makes the stem visible—but it is a sibling case form, not an ancestor.
RANK 20GRADE Aranked reveal
King is a kin-word, not a royal word.
English king continues Old English cyning and Germanic *kuninga-, built on the kin or lineage base *kunja-. Latin rēx, royal, and regal belong to a different root—and even “leader of the kin” overstates the disputed original Germanic sense.
RANK 39GRADE Aranked reveal
Old Norse fjándi was an enemy before it was the Devil.
Cleasby and Vigfússon identify the inherited -nd- shape as participial and gloss the older formation as properly a hater. Their first sense is the ordinary enemy; only after the introduction of Christianity does the historical account assign fjándi the fiend branch. ONP then reveals how far the word traveled: 222 citations across enemy, demon, evil spirit, pagan god, Satan, and derogatory uses for hated or bewitched beings and things. The truth is not that every enemy secretly hates. It is that a lexicalized agent noun became an ordinary social category, then accumulated new religious and expressive work.
RANK 42GRADE Aranked reveal
The ordinary Old Norse enemy outlived the finite hate verb behind it.
ONP classifies fjá as poetic and exposes no prose citations. Cleasby, Fritzner, and Lexicon Poeticum converge on three Eddic contexts, while normalized texts preserve active fjá, finite fíár, and reflexive fiásk. Cleasby then points to fjándi as the participial relative that remained across Germanic. ONP gives that separate enemy noun 222 prose citations and a large semantic range. The two corpus totals are not directly frequency-comparable, and neither proves an exact extinction event; together they reveal the asymmetry between a tiny finite-verb record and the prolific lexicalized enemy branch.
RANK 43GRADE Aranked reveal
Old Norse hate was action, contempt, humiliation, and feeling inside one verb.
ONP's 101-citation prose article orders four active senses before its participial and reciprocal branches: persecute; despise, reject, or cast aside; mock or humiliate; and hate, despise, or stand hostile. Fritzner independently moves from pursuit and destruction to ordinary hate. A c1200 manuscript leaf visibly writes hata in a command to love chastity and hate no person. The article's sense order is not a chronology, and the poetic concordance is explicitly unreviewed; the reveal is the documented semantic range, not an invented first essence.
RANK 46GRADE Aranked reveal
Old High German hazzōn is a paradigm fault line, not proof that hate originally meant pursue.
The clean dictionary headword conceals paired ēn and ōn forms: Starling reports hazzēn in the eighth century and hazzōn in the ninth, Duden prints haʒʒēn and haʒʒōn, and the UT reflex index also records hazēn and hazōn. Corpus-wide research confirms that Old High German ēn verbs can show ōn double forms. DWB reports aemulari and insequi alignments that support emulation, following, or hostile pursuit—but Pokorny’s comparative warning is exact: Germanic evidence does not prove that pursue was the root’s basic meaning. The normalized form, the source-reported tokens, the paradigm analysis, and the prehistoric semantic claim are four different evidence layers.
RANK 55GRADE Aranked reveal
frændi is friend’s cognate—but kinship became its Old Norse center.
The Germanic family did not carry one frozen dictionary definition into every daughter language. OED places Old Icelandic frændi beside English friend; Cleasby–Vigfússon and Fritzner preserve the old participial analysis; ONP then exposes what happened in use. Its 225 citations distinguish friend, foster brother or companion, kinsman or son, parents, and ancestor, with no sharp wall between friend and kin. The unveiling is semantic divergence backed by a shared graph: English centers chosen companion, while the Scandinavian cognate centers family without ceasing to be cognate.
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 95GRADE Aranked reveal
Ten and decimal are cousins, not borrower and source.
English ten is inherited through Germanic; decimal is learned through Latin. Both independently continue the reconstructed Indo-European numeral family.
RANK 101GRADE Aranked reveal
To betroth is to bind by one’s truth or troth.
Middle English bitrouthen visibly combines bi-/be- with trouth, the historical fidelity noun before modern truth and troth were cleanly separated.
047
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
historical dictionary21 CLAIM LINKS
An Icelandic-English Dictionary — fjándi
Richard Cleasby · Guðbrandur Vigfússon / 1874
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary20 CLAIM LINKS
An Icelandic-English Dictionary — FRÆNDI
Richard Cleasby · Guðbrandur Vigfússon / 1874
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary14 CLAIM LINKS
An Icelandic-English Dictionary — fjá
Richard Cleasby · Guðbrandur Vigfússon / 1874
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary14 CLAIM LINKS
An Icelandic-English Dictionary — hatr
Richard Cleasby · Guðbrandur Vigfússon · Sampo Silvennoinen digital edition / 1874
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary9 CLAIM LINKS
An Icelandic-English Dictionary — hata
Richard Cleasby · Guðbrandur Vigfússon / 1874
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary3 CLAIM LINKS
Boy — Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Word Origin
Oxford University Press Editors / 2026
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary1 CLAIM LINKS
Cleasby–Vigfusson Old Norse Dictionary: lag
Richard Cleasby · Guðbrandur Vigfússon / 1874
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗050
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “lea.” 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.