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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
noun · verbexact headword
hate
An inherited Germanic hostility word whose English noun and verb histories converge imperfectly: Old English preserves both hete and hatian, Middle English may have remodeled the noun from the verb, and the proposed deeper Indo-European family remains semantically opaque.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounexact historical form
hatred
A Middle English formation built from hate plus the fossilized native condition suffix -rede / -reden, with a secure Germanic hate family but a semantically difficult and explicitly disputed deeper Indo-European proposal.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗German masculine nouncontrarian claim
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 ↗German masculine nouncontrarian claim
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 ↗German masculine nouncontrarian claim
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 ↗Middle Irish nouncontrarian claim
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 ↗English nouncontrarian claim
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 ↗Swedish common-gender nouncontrarian claim
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 lemmacontrarian claim
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 ↗Gothic masculine nd-stem common nouncontrarian claim
fijands
A Gothic masculine nd-stem noun conventionally glossed enemy. Project Wulfila currently exposes 26 candidates: three verified noun assignments, two further noun-only assignments, and 21 surface forms also listed under the living verb fijan. Ayora Estevan explains the collision diachronically: Proto-Germanic had already lexicalized the present-participial *fi(j)and- as enemy, while Gothic retained productive one-who-hates participles beside the noun. The five noun-only candidates use fiand, fijands, fijande, and fijandis; all five were inspected in Codex Argenteus facsimiles.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Danish common-gender nouncontrarian claim
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 verbcontrarian claim
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 ↗0212
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
●
Middle English / Indo-European
hate
hate, extreme anger, hostility, or the lexical base of hatrede
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- exact historical form
- DOSSIERS
- 2
Present-Day English / Indo-European
hate
as a noun, intense hostility, aversion, or an object of hostility; as a verb, feel enmity or strong aversion
- DATE
- before the 12th century–today
- MATCH
- exact historical form
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Middle English / Indo-European
haten
to hate or treat with enmity
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Proto-Germanic / Indo-European
*fi(j)and-
lexicalized enemy formation from the hate verb’s present participle
- DATE
- Proto-Germanic reconstruction
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 10
Proto-Germanic / Indo-European
*fi(j)ēn-
a reconstructed verb meaning hate or be hostile toward
- DATE
- Proto-Germanic reconstruction
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 14
Proto-Germanic / Indo-European
*hatiz-
hate, anger, enmity, spite, or hostility
- DATE
- Proto-Germanic
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 18
Proto-Germanic / Indo-European
*hatōjan-
to hate or treat with enmity
- DATE
- Proto-Germanic
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 2
Proto-Indo-European / Indo-European
*peh₁-
a proposed base associated with harm, blame, suffering, or hate
- DATE
- proposed Proto-Indo-European base
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 14
Proto-Germanic / Indo-European
*xatēnan ~ *xatōjanan
reconstructed class-III or related weak verbs meaning hate
- DATE
- Proto-Germanic reconstruction alternatives
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 6
Middle Irish / Indo-European
cais
love; hate, with readings dependent on context
- DATE
- Middle Irish and later Irish dictionary citations
- 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
Old Norse / Indo-European
fjá
to hate; in the reflexive, to hate someone
- DATE
- Old Norse poetic record; exact composition dates not fixed here
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
0324
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
openproposedexact word
Did Middle English hate directly continue Old English hete?
Possibly, but the immediate route is disputed. American Heritage gives direct noun descent; Merriam-Webster says the noun was probably derived from haten and replaced hete.
openproposedexact word
Did hate originally mean pursuit or persecution?
The Germanic action evidence makes pursuit or persecution a serious proposal, not a settled origin. Beowulf, hettan, German hetzen, and Hati support the comparison, but the full deep family remains murky.
openprobableexact word
Does hate securely descend from *ḱeh₂d-?
Only probably. The formal correspondence is widely published, but grief, care, mourning, love, and hatred do not form a transparent semantic chain, and some proposed cognates may not belong together.
resolvedestablishedexact word
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.
resolvedestablishedexact word
Has hate always meant extreme enmity?
No. The current verb also covers strong dislike, distaste, and polite reluctance, while older English evidence includes hostile treatment and persecution. One gloss cannot be projected across every period and construction.
resolvedestablishedexact word
Is hatred the older or more original word?
No. Hate is inherited from Old English noun and verb material; hatred is a Middle English formation first reported in the 13th century. Its suffix names a condition rather than linguistic originality.
openprobableposition text
Can the lexicalization of one who hates as enemy be dated to one exact event?
No unique event is known. Cross-branch evidence places it before the recorded daughter languages, but no text records the prehistoric lexicalization moment.
openproposedposition text
Do Celtic cais and Greek κῆδος prove that love and hate share one root?
No. They belong to a disputed wider comparison. Middle Irish cais carries a striking love-and-hatred field, but that does not make German Liebe an ancestor or cognate of Hass.
openproposedposition text
Are the opposite readings one polysemous word, merged historical homonyms, or a lexicographic convenience?
eDIL groups them in one headword but does not, by that editorial act alone, settle the full historical relationship among every love and hate occurrence.
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
Does cais securely prove cognacy with the Germanic hate family?
No. The Celtic–Germanic comparison is serious enough to display, but the graph keeps it as a context link rather than a genealogical edge because formal and semantic acceptance remain unsettled.
openprobableposition text
Is fijands an ordinary participle or a lexical noun meaning enemy?
Both categories exist historically and synchronically. Ayora Estevan derives the noun from a Proto-Germanic lexicalized present participle, then shows Gothic still using fi(j)ands as the productive participle one who hates. Token-level syntax and inflection sometimes distinguish them; many surface forms do not.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
RANK 25GRADE Aexact ranked word
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 24GRADE Aranked reveal
Hatred is medieval—and its -red means neither red nor “more.”
Middle English assembled hate with a dying native element for a state or condition. The compound is younger than its parts; below the secure Germanic hate family, even the celebrated PIE root remains a qualified and semantically difficult proposal.
RANK 26GRADE Acontrarian claim
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 Acontrarian claim
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 Acontrarian claim
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 Acontrarian claim
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 32GRADE Acontrarian claim
Enemy is a fossilized hater—but 21 Gothic tokens still refuse to choose.
Project Wulfila lists 42 candidates under fijan and 26 under the enemy noun fijands. Their intersection is exactly 21 surface tokens. Ayora Estevan explains the collision: *fi(j)and- had lexicalized as enemy before Gothic, while Gothic still possessed the productive present participle one who hates. Case and syntax resolve some passages; the remaining 21 stay public as noun-versus-participle ambiguity.
RANK 33GRADE Acontrarian claim
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 34GRADE Acontrarian claim
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 36GRADE Acontrarian claim
German Feind is English fiend’s undemonic cousin: both fossilize one who hates.
Duden, DWDS/Pfeifer, and Grimm independently carry Feind through Middle and Old High German to a substantivized hating participle. OED places English fiend on the collateral Old English branch. German retained the ordinary enemy or opponent at its semantic center; English turned the cognate toward Devil, demon, and vicious person.
049
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
historical dictionary102 CLAIM LINKS
Hate — definition, etymology, and first known use
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary10 CLAIM LINKS
Hate — definition and etymology
American Heritage Dictionary Editors / 2022
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗etymological dictionary80 CLAIM LINKS
A Handbook of Germanic Etymology — *xataz, *xatjanan, and *xatōjanan
Vladimir Orel / 2003
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary33 CLAIM LINKS
eDIL — 1 cais, noun explained as both love and hate
Royal Irish Academy · eDIL editors / 2026
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗research article17 CLAIM LINKS
Notes on Gothic Forms — Hatan : hatjan “to hate”
Albert Morey Sturtevant / 1954
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical grammar15 CLAIM LINKS
A Gothic Grammar with Selections for Reading and a Glossary — hatan and hatjan
Wilhelm Braune · translated and edited by Gerhard H. Balg / 1895
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical grammar11 CLAIM LINKS
Grammar of the Gothic Language — glossary entries hatan, hatis, hatizōn, and hatjan
Joseph Wright / 1910
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary7 CLAIM LINKS
Bosworth–Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary — feón, to hate
Joseph Bosworth · Thomas Northcote Toller · Christ Sean · Ondřej Tichý / 2014
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary0 CLAIM LINKS
hāte n. — Middle English Dictionary search record
Robert E. Lewis et al. · Frances McSparran et al. / 2001
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗0512
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
SOURCE REPORTEDlexicographic first use
Merriam-Webster first-known-use record for hate as a verb
hate / hate / before the 12th century
Hate — definition, etymology, and first known useexact attested form / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexicographic first use
Merriam-Webster first-known-use record for hate as a noun
hate / hate / 12th century
Hate — definition, etymology, and first known useexact attested form / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Psalm, hands of haters
fēogan / fēogan / Old English, source-reported
Bosworth–Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary — FEÓGANreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Psalm, people who hate without cause
fēogan / fēogan / Old English, source-reported
Bosworth–Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary — FEÓGANreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Psalm, those who hate peace
fēogan / fēogan / Old English, source-reported
Bosworth–Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary — FEÓGANreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Psalm, imperative to hate evil
fēogan / fēogan / Old English, source-reported
Bosworth–Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary — FEÓGANreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Gísl Illugason, Magnússflokkr 7
hata / hata / poem attributed 1104; concordance date unreviewed
Lexicon Poeticum — hata, verbwitness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus
English prose works of Richard Rolle, selected edition
hatrede / hatreden / hateredyn / hatred / Middle English text, edition page 65
English prose works of Richard Rolle: a selectionreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus
English prose works of Richard Rolle, selected edition
hatrede / hatreden / hateredyn / hatred / Middle English text, edition page 88
English prose works of Richard Rolle: a selectionreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Love turning into hate
Hass / Hass / contemporary dictionary example, source-reported
Duden — Hassreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Love-and-hate temporal opposition
hatr / hatr / Old Norse prose corpus, source-reported
Dictionary of Old Norse Prose — ²hatr, neuter nounreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Graff lexical record aligned with Latin insequuntur
haʒʒēn / haʒʒōn / hassen / Old High German record, source-reported
Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm — hassenwitness excerpt / 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.