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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
verbexact headword
lay
To put, place, or set down; an inherited causative verb in the same deep lie-and-lay family that produced law.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounhistorical form
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 ↗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 ↗English common noun and historical adjectivedossier summary
friend
English friend continues Middle English frẹ̄nd and Old English frēond, an inherited Germanic nd-stem agent noun. OED identifies cognates across West, East, and North Germanic and analyzes them as noun uses of a present participle of the Germanic base behind free; Bosworth–Toller explicitly calls Old English freónd the participle of freón, a verb meaning free or love; American Heritage independently explains the formation as originally one who loves. The historical noun later covers intimate companion, ally, supporter, relation, lover, form of address, Quaker, climbing device, and social-network contact. The graph displays a normalized *frijōnd- participial formation, Germanic *frī-, the proposed Indo-European comparison *prī-, and then stops.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Norse masculine noundossier summary
frændi
Old Norse frændi belongs to the same inherited Germanic present-participial family as English friend, German Freund, and Dutch vriend, but cognacy did not freeze one meaning. The Dictionary of Old Norse Prose structures 225 citations into friend; foster brother or companion; kinsman, relative, or son; parents; and ancestor, while warning that the friend and kin divisions are not sharp. Cleasby and Vigfússon call the Scandinavian semantic specialization striking and treat kinsman as the ordinary center; Zoëga likewise gives kinsman, brother, son, and ancestor. Fritzner preserves the historical formation as a participle of frjá and compares the West and East Germanic friend words. The graph joins frændi directly to the same reviewed *frijōnd-, *frī-, and proposed *prī- nodes as friend, Freund, and vriend, then stops. The displayed pronunciation is a normalized approximation, not recorded medieval audio.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old English strong masculine nd-stem noundossier summary
frēond
Old English frēond is the directly attested source-language noun behind modern friend. OED analyzes it as an inherited strong masculine agent noun in -nd, ultimately a noun use of the present participle of the Germanic base behind free, and documents West Saxon frēond, Northumbrian and Kentish frīond, Kentish frīand, mutated frīend and frȳnd, endingless plurals, and re-formed frēondas. Bosworth–Toller prints freónd and friónd, explicitly links freónde loving to freón or freógan, and supplies examples for companion, ally, relation, friend of God, friend versus foe, and friends acting as arbitrators. OED independently preserves close companion, non-enemy, ally, and kinsman senses in Old English. Cotton MS Vitellius A XV folio 152r was directly inspected at Beowulf 1018, where the pixels visibly preserve freondum in Heorot innan wæs freondum afylled. The route reuses the reviewed *frijōnd-, *frī-, and proposed *prī- nodes and then stops. The displayed pronunciation is a normalized approximation, not a recorded voice.
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 Dutch masculine noundossier summary
fīunt
Old Dutch fīunt is the normalized headword behind a twenty-six-occurrence historical-dictionary record for enemy or opponent. ONW classifies the noun as synchronically unsegmented but says it was originally the present participle of the verb corresponding to Old High German fīēn and Gothic fijan, a verb no longer known in Dutch. Its frequency table preserves six case-number cells: nominative and genitive singular plus nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative plural. Those are not a complete paradigm. The article displays twenty representative location blocks after warning that locations in the semantic profile have been reduced. Most early Wachtendonck Psalms material is linguistically dated 901–1000 but survives in copies dated 1595–1605, circa 1598, or 1701–1800; no tenth-century manuscript object was inspected. One dfiunt or fiunt gloss aligned with Latin diabolus is textually disputed, and one Groningen psalm gloss is explicitly assigned to Old Frisian by the dictionary. This dossier therefore treats fīunt as a nominal fossil with a partially preserved inflectional record, not as a productive Old Dutch participle or a complete transparent paradigm.
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 ↗Old Norse weak verbdossier summary
hata
Old Norse hata is not only a medieval label for an inward feeling. The Dictionary of Old Norse Prose structures 101 prose citations under four active senses before its participial and reflexive branches: persecute; despise, reject, or cast aside; mock or humiliate; and hate, despise, or stand hostile toward. That ordering is a lexicographic analysis, not a chronology of semantic change. Fritzner independently begins with pursue or seek to destroy, continues through damage or destruction, and only then gives hate opposed to love. Zoëga likewise preserves poetic damage or destruction beside ordinary hate, while Cleasby and Vigfússon record active, reflexive, reciprocal, participial, and disputed poetic uses. Lexicon Poeticum displays eleven linked rows, including variants, damage, destruction, persecution, loathing, haters, and the gold-spending formula, but warns that its concordance has not been reviewed and that dates need checking. A c1200 scan of Holm perg 15 4°, folio 89v, was directly inspected against ONP's diplomatic transcription and visibly preserves hata in the line Elſcaþu hréinlife oc hata engi maɴ. All other rows remain source-reported. The generated possible runic inscriptions on modern dictionary transcriptions are excluded, and no exact historical pronunciation is invented.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noundossier summary
icon
An image, likeness, representative figure, or display symbol, borrowed through Late Latin from Greek eikōn.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noun · verbdossier summary
law
A binding rule, body of rules, or regular principle; a Scandinavian loan in Old English whose deepest secure family means lie or lay.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗0212
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
●
Present-Day English / Indo-European
lay
to put, place, or set down
- DATE
- Middle English continuation–today
- MATCH
- exact historical form
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Proto-Germanic / Indo-European
*lagam
a laying down; what is fixed or set
- DATE
- Proto-Germanic prehistory
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Proto-Germanic / Indo-European
*lagojanan
to cause to lie; to lay
- DATE
- Proto-Germanic prehistory
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Proto-Indo-European / Indo-European
*legh-
to lie, recline, lay, or set down
- DATE
- Indo-European prehistory
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 2
Present-Day English / Indo-European
chess
the two-player strategy board game
- DATE
- 14th century–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
icon
image, likeness, representative symbol, or computer-display symbol
- DATE
- 1572–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Old English / Indo-European
lecgan
to lay, put, place, or set down
- DATE
- Old English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Old Norse / Indo-European
lǫg / lög; lag
law; a laying, layer, order, or disposition
- DATE
- Old Norse
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Latin / Indo-European
prologus
preface to a play or introductory discourse
- DATE
- Latin antiquity and Late Latin
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Ancient Greek / Indo-European
πρόλογος
prologosspeech before; portion of a play before the chorus
- DATE
- Ancient Greek
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Malayalam / Dravidian
മാങ്ങ
māṅṅamango fruit
- DATE
- Malayalam
- MATCH
- language
- DOSSIERS
- 1
0322
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
openproposedexact word
Is Proto-Germanic *lagojanan an attested form?
No. It is a reconstruction printed by Etymonline; comparative evidence supports the family, while exact notation and intermediate morphology remain analytical.
resolvedestablishedexact word
Are all English words spelled lay one historical word?
No. The set-down verb is inherited from Old English lecgan; the poem noun and non-clerical adjective come through distinct French, Latin, and Greek histories.
resolvedestablishedexact word
Are lay and lie simply the same verb?
They are historically related but grammatically distinct inherited verbs: lay is transitive and causative, while lie is intransitive; lay is also the standard past tense of lie, which creates modern ambiguity.
resolvedestablishedexact word
Does law descend from lay—or lay from law?
Neither. They are lexical cousins whose lineages converge at reconstructed *legh-. Law reaches it through a Scandinavian nominal formation; lay reaches it through an inherited causative verb.
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.
openproposedposition text
Does fjende securely descend from exactly *peh₁-?
Only as a qualified modern proposal. The Germanic noun-and-verb relationship is firmer than the displayed Indo-European route.
openproposedposition text
Does fjá securely descend from exactly *peh₁-?
Only as a qualified modern proposal. The Germanic comparison is firmer than the displayed Indo-European route.
openproposedposition text
Does fjándi securely descend from exactly *peh₁-?
Only as a qualified modern proposal. The Germanic noun-and-verb relation is firmer than the displayed Indo-European route.
openproposedposition text
Does friend securely descend from exactly *prī-?
It is a published Indo-European comparison, not direct attestation. The Germanic and Old English stages are firmer than the deepest displayed root.
openprobableposition text
Can the exact Old Norse pronunciation be heard or uniquely recovered?
No. The displayed IPA is a normalized scholarly approximation; manuscript spelling and comparative phonology cannot reproduce one recorded medieval voice.
openprobableposition text
Can the exact pronunciation of frēond be heard or uniquely recovered?
No. The displayed IPA is a normalized scholarly approximation across written dialect evidence, not one recorded Old English voice.
openprobableposition text
Is fēogan a strong verb or a weak contracted verb?
Bosworth–Toller labels the full FEÓGAN entry strong, but labels linked contracted feón weak and contracted. The displayed past forms in -de also require grammatical explanation. The dossier preserves the source-level tension rather than silently harmonizing it.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 10
RANK 74GRADE Aexact ranked word
Lay and law are cousins; the other lays are strangers.
The set-down verb and law meet at *legh-. Lay the poem and lay meaning non-clerical arrived through different French, Latin, and Greek histories.
RANK 8GRADE Aranked reveal
Etymology calls itself the “true account.”
Greek ἔτυμος “true, real” joined -λογία “account or study”; even that truth-word reaches a reconstructed root.
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.
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 49GRADE Aranked reveal
The token is attested even though the dictionary headword wears an asterisk.
Köbler heads the Old Saxon noun hėti* but lists written accusative and dative heti plus genitive hetias beneath it. The exact Munich Heliand token is directly visible in the clause rîkioro manno heti endi harmquidi. The dictionary count three also hides a second distinction: it means three lexical loci, while Heliand 1322 survives with M, C, and V readings, producing five reported witness readings across the dossier. The star therefore belongs to an editorial headword layer; it does not erase the attested surface or turn Old Saxon into Proto-Germanic. The visible Heliand context is endured hostility or persecution, while the Saxon Confession groups hetias with malice, envy, and slander. Even the inherited grammar stays open: Fulk and Köbler use an i-stem analysis, whereas Pfeifer calls the wider noun an old es/os-stem.
RANK 51GRADE Aranked reveal
Care, grief, funerals, and in-laws occupy one Greek noun—but hate does not secretly mean care.
LSJ's κῆδος entry moves through care and concern, anxiety and grief, troubles, mourning and funeral rites, an object of care, and connection by marriage. Homeric κήδεʼ can be many-troubled woes; Aeschylus can make Helen an object of care while playing on marriage affinity. Comparative sources then place the noun beside Celtic and Germanic hatred words under *ḱh₂d-es- and *ḱeh₂d-. The reveal is not a mystical reversal in which hate “really” means care. Merriam-Webster calls the semantic relations far from transparent, Liberman challenges the wider family's unity, and the Greek evidence itself resists a single linear story.
RANK 79GRADE Aranked reveal
The modern spelling arrived after the word.
Urdu historical records preserve چا and چاہ before standard modern چائے displaced them. A familiar written form can be the newest layer of an older spoken history.
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.
RANK 179GRADE A-ranked reveal
A supermarket word carries an Indian Ocean contact history.
English mango came through Portuguese manga, probably from Malayalam māṅṅa.
RANK 183GRADE A−ranked reveal
Law and legal are semantic twins, not direct relatives.
Law comes from Scandinavian “what is laid down”; legal comes from Latin lēx. Only a possible, explicitly uncertain prehistoric route may reconnect them.
045
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
historical dictionary5 CLAIM LINKS
Lay — Origin and history
Douglas Harper / 2026
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary4 CLAIM LINKS
Lay — Definition, Word History, and First Known Use
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary6 CLAIM LINKS
American Heritage Dictionary: lay
American Heritage Dictionary Editors / 2022
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗conference paper5 CLAIM LINKS
Türkçe Sözlüklerde Çok Anlamlı Sözlük Birimlerindeki Art Zamanlı Anlam Değişme Olayları ve “Çay” Örneği
Erdoğan Boz / 2012
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary3 CLAIM LINKS
A Malayalam and English Dictionary — māṅṅa
Hermann Gundert / 1872
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗052
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
SOURCE REPORTEDlexicographic first use
Merriam-Webster source-reported Old English record
lecgan / lay / before the 12th century
Lay — Definition, Word History, and First Known Usereporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Aeschylus, Helen as object of care with a marriage-sense play
κῆδος / κῆδος / Classical Athenian tragedy, source-reported
Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek-English Lexicon — κῆδοςreporting 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.