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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.
0112
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
verb and adjectiveexact headword
direct
To guide, aim, command, or proceed without deviation or intermediary; continuing Latin dīrēctus and dīrigere through distinct medieval channels.
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
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
bride
A woman about to be or recently married; inherited from Old English brȳd and directly preserved inside bridegroom.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗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 ↗noun · verbhistorical form
clew
A ball of thread, a nautical corner or line, and the older spelling behind clue.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗adjective · noundossier summary
conscious
Aware, awake, or deliberate; borrowed directly from Latin conscius in the knowing-family.
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 class-III weak-verb lemmahistorical form
fijan
A Gothic class-III weak verb conventionally glossed hate or detest. Project Wulfila currently exposes 42 candidate tokens under fijan: 13 verified, eight further lexically unambiguous, and 21 explicitly ambiguous with the masculine nd-stem noun fijands, enemy. The surface inventory contains fifteen written shapes, including one exact infinitive fijan in John 7:7 and four j-less forms. Ayora Estevan shows why the overlap cannot be normalized away: Proto-Germanic had already lexicalized *fi(j)and- as enemy, while Gothic still used the matching present-participial formation for one who hates.
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 ↗0212
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
●
Present-Day English / Indo-European
direct
guide, aim, command, straight, immediate
- DATE
- 14th century–today
- MATCH
- exact historical form
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Middle English / Indo-European
directen
guide, address, point, direct
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Anglo-French / Indo-European
directer
direct, guide
- DATE
- Anglo-French
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Latin / Indo-European
dīrēctus
straightened; straight
- DATE
- Latin
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 1
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-Indo-European / Indo-European
*reg-to-
directed straight; right
- DATE
- Proto-Indo-European suffixed formation
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Latin / Indo-European
dīrigere
set straight, direct, guide
- DATE
- Latin
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Gothic / Indo-European
fijan
to hate or detest; direct an experience of hostility toward a stimulus
- DATE
- Gothic textual tradition
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Latin / Indo-European
regere
lead straight, direct, rule
- DATE
- Latin
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 2
Latin / Indo-European
regimen
control, government, direction
- DATE
- Latin
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
regulate
govern, order, direct, or adjust according to rule
- DATE
- 15th century–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
0324
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
resolvedestablishedexact word
Did direct originally mean only immediate or unmediated?
No. The recorded history foregrounds straightening, guiding, pointing, and directing; immediacy is one later semantic branch.
resolvedestablishedexact word
Did every English function arrive through one identical medieval route?
No. Merriam-Webster routes the verb and adverb through Anglo-French directer while giving the adjective from Latin directus.
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.
openprobableposition text
Did English algorism arrive through French or directly from Medieval Latin?
The sources preserve both channels. Merriam-Webster names Middle French and Medieval Latin; Etymonline emphasizes Old French from Medieval Latin.
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
Did love develop into hate, hate into love, or both from another meaning?
No reviewed source establishes one direction. The citations show an opposition; they do not date a semantic transition.
openproposedposition text
Is Proto-Celtic *katsi- the secure direct parent of cais?
Koch publishes the comparison, but the reviewed materials do not expose a complete dated Goidelic derivation or independent consensus sufficient to mark the edge established.
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
How was historical cais pronounced in each cited period and region?
Not directly recoverable from the reviewed evidence. Written forms and variants do not constitute recorded audio or a complete phonological reconstruction.
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.
openboundaryposition text
Is *lˤra the final word on the ancestry of tea?
It is the final reviewed reconstruction in this dossier, not a declaration that no deeper hypothesis exists. No unique deeper form is promoted until a competing analysis is encoded with direct evidence.
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.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
RANK 109GRADE Aexact ranked word
Direct is a straight-line word before it is an immediacy word.
Latin dīrigere combines dī-/dis- with regere, to guide or lead straight; its participle dīrēctus supplies the straightened form behind English.
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 25GRADE Acontrarian claim
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.
RANK 26GRADE Aranked reveal
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.
RANK 28GRADE Aranked reveal
German hostile agitation still carries a hound’s chase.
The medieval verb drives dogs after quarry. The same directed-force construction is soon applied to people: Middle High German records set people against one another, and Early New High German polemic sets rulers against Christians. Modern political hetzen is therefore not merely “hate” verbalized; it inherits a grammar of making another actor pursue, pressure, or attack.
RANK 29GRADE Aranked reveal
One Gothic hate verb survives once—in a command to do good to those who hate you.
Project Wulfila’s only verified hatjan token is hatjandam in Matthew 5:44, directly visible on Codex Argenteus folio 3v. A parallel “love your enemies” command in Luke 6:27 instead uses hatandans from class-III hatan. The translation gloss “hate” therefore hides a genuine grammatical and historical dispute.
RANK 30GRADE Aranked reveal
Gothic hatis—the noun related to English hate—survives chiefly as wrath, including the wrath to come and the wrath of God.
Project Wulfila reports fifteen tokens in hatis, hatiza, and hatize. Fourteen are biblical; Streitberg maps the family chiefly to Greek orgē, gives Galatians 5:20 thumos, and flags Ephesians 4:31 because both stand together. Codex Argenteus folio 129r directly preserves hatiza in “the wrath to come.” Even the paradigm resists simplification: synchronic neuter a-stem, historically an i-stem remodeled into it.
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 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 45GRADE Aranked reveal
One Gothic anger verb survives in one question—and not in its dictionary form.
Project Wulfila’s complete current inventory contains one hatizōn token: hatizoþ in John 7:23, “are you angry at me?” Codex Argenteus folio 94v directly preserves the inflection. The manuscript never writes the normalized infinitive or its editorial macron. Grammar then reveals another layer: hatizōn is a class-II verb built from the consonantal stem hatiz- of hatis “hatred” or “wrath.” One English gloss therefore hides a noun-to-verb formation, one surviving grammatical person, and a sharp boundary between pixels and reconstruction.
043
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
historical dictionary9 CLAIM LINKS
Direct — American Heritage Dictionary
American Heritage Dictionary Editors / 2022
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary8 CLAIM LINKS
Direct — Definition, Word History, and First Known Use
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗research database5 CLAIM LINKS
Lemma fian — redirect and historical dictionary variant
Project Wulfila editors · Wilhelm Streitberg / 2026
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗053
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
SOURCE REPORTEDlexicographic first use
Merriam-Webster first-known-use report for direct
direct / direct / 14th century
Direct — Definition, Word History, and First Known Useexact attested form / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Otfried, friends addressed directly
friunt / Freund / ninth century, source-reported
Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm — Freundreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Njáls saga, a kinsman addressed directly
frændi / frændi / manuscript dated circa 1300–1325 by ONP
Dictionary of Old Norse Prose — frǽndi, masculine nounreporting source / 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.