ob + es
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 LOCALNo exact match for “obs” 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.
Lewis’s Elementary Latin Dictionary
1890 American Book Company edition; pinned Perseus XML digitizationobs
This word is outside the curated dossier collection. Here is the dictionary’s etymology, with its language and revision preserved. These claims have not yet passed *SET-U’s graph review.
See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.
Clipping of observant .
Read the complete entry and references ↗ · Contribute a cited dossier
016
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
verbdossier summary
exhume
To remove from burial or recover from obscurity; borrowed from Medieval Latin exhumare, literally a formation on ex, out of, and humus, earth.
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 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 Frisian weak verbcontrarian claim
hatia
Old Frisian hatia is a weak verb whose lexicographic field extends beyond an inward feeling. Hofmann and Popkema give hate or reject, damage, and a feud-language expression for harming or pursuing someone as an enemy. A May 2026 Corpus Oudfries search for word or lemma hatia returns six records in 235,462 tokens, but those are not six instances of this verb. Buma's critical note on Brokmer B 101 explicitly identifies its written hatia as atia "rear" with prothetic h, and Nijdam translates the passage as a poor mother being unable to feed her children. That token is excluded from the hate lineage. The five relevant corpus records occur in legal, road, family, and theological contexts: forms hatijen, hatie, hata, and hatien can concern harming or hindering on a road, a writing or event going against someone, or God hating perjury, lying speech, and false witnesses. The current corpus count is a bounded research surface, not a frequency estimate for medieval speech or a claim about every surviving witness. The underlying manuscripts were not directly inspected for this dossier, no earliest-use claim is made, and no exact historical pronunciation is invented.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
shaman
English shaman, recorded by 1698, is ultimately from Evenki šamān. European scholarship later generalized one Siberian term across many unrelated spiritual traditions.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
troth
Pledged fidelity, good faith, or betrothal; a surviving historical twin of truth rather than a later poetic fabrication.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗021
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
0311
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 8
openprobableposition text
Is the exact phonetic shape of *fi(j)and- directly known?
No. The form is a comparative reconstruction. Optional j notation, branch vowels, and the relation of written historical variants require analysis rather than direct Proto-Germanic observation.
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.
openproposedposition text
Why forty?
Religious symbolism, inherited medical theory, logistics, and observation have all been proposed; no single motivation is treated as proven here.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Did conscience always mean only a moral judge?
No. Moral awareness is early and central, but the Latin family and an obsolete English sense also include consciousness or general awareness.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Is enemy still the ordinary modern meaning of fiend?
No. OED marks the literal enemy or foe sense obsolete and dates that sense through 1450, while supernatural and hostile-person senses continue.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Did fiend originally mean demon?
No. OED dates enemy or foe from Old English to 1450 and marks it obsolete; Devil was originally a specific use of enemy as the ultimate adversary.
resolvedprobableposition text
Are the remaining five records all semantically identical?
No. They range across road harm or obstruction, writing or events going against a person, family-law adversity, and divine hatred; two Jurisprudentia Frisica passages remain only cautiously glossed.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Was Munich hotie directly inspected?
Yes. Cgm 25 scan 150 visibly preserves hotie in the phrase an iuuuomu hugea hotie.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 3
RANK 34GRADE Aranked reveal
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.
RANK 35GRADE Aranked reveal
A fiend was an enemy before it was a demon.
OED’s revised history starts with enemy or foe and explains the Devil as the ultimate Enemy. The English noun continues Old English fēond, itself inherited from a Germanic lexicalized one-who-hates formation. Middle English then preserves enemy, Satan, demon, possession, and monster senses together before the literal enemy sense becomes obsolete.
RANK 86GRADE Aranked reveal
Origin does not get the last word.
Calling something “etymological” describes its historical analysis; it does not make an obsolete sense more correct than a word’s established current meaning.
040
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “obs.” Absence describes this graph, not all of linguistic scholarship.
050
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
No reviewed record in this collection contains “obs.” 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.