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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.
016
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
adjective · nounexact headword
legal
Of law or permitted by law; borrowed through Anglo-French from Latin lēgālis and lēx.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noundossier summary
fiction
Invented narrative, imaginative creation, pretense, or legal assumption; borrowed through French from Latin fictio, an action of shaping, molding, or feigning.
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
hostis
The Latin word for an outsider or public enemy, preserving the historical semantic turn from foreign stranger to armed opponent.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noun · verbcontrarian claim
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 ↗nouncontrarian claim
trust
Assured reliance, confidence, or responsibility; probably entering Middle English from Scandinavian material meaning confidence and firmness.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗026
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
●
Present-Day English / Indo-European
legal
of, founded on, or permitted by law
- DATE
- 15th century–today
- MATCH
- exact historical form
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Anglo-French / Indo-European
legal
of law
- DATE
- Anglo-French
- MATCH
- exact historical form
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Latin / Indo-European
lēgālis
legal; pertaining to law
- DATE
- Latin antiquity
- MATCH
- historical-form prefix
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
fiction
invented narrative; imaginative creation; pretense; legal assumption
- DATE
- 14th century–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Latin / Indo-European
fictiō
action of shaping or molding; feigning; pretense; legal fiction
- DATE
- Latin antiquity
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Old English / Indo-European
lagu
ordinance, prescribed rule, regulation, or legal district
- DATE
- Old English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
0316
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
openproposedexact word
Did Latin lēx originally mean a “collection of rules”?
That semantic bridge and the deeper gather-root connection are plausible published analyses, not an uncontested fact. The root shape *leǵ- versus *sleǵ- is also disputed.
resolvedestablishedexact word
Is legal descended from English law?
No. legal is borrowed through Anglo-French from Latin lēgālis and lēx; English law has a separate Germanic and Scandinavian ancestry.
openproposedposition text
Is damage a late semantic extension or an old legal and feud specialization?
Not established. The dictionaries document damage and enemy-pursuit senses, but the reviewed records do not supply a continuous dated semantic transition series.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Did fiction originally mean only an invented story?
No. Latin fictiō includes shaping or molding, feigning, pretense, and legal fiction; Middle English begins with invention of the mind.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does the friend-free relationship prove that early friends were legally free group members?
No. The reviewed sources establish a lexical base spanning love, favor, and freeing; they do not recover one legal or sociological institution behind the word.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Did frēond literally mean one who loves in every context?
No. The formation motivates the inherited noun, but attested uses include companion, ally, relation, religious epithet, and legal arbitrator.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Did frēond become polysemous only after Old English?
No. Companion, ally or non-enemy, relation, religious friend, and social-legal helper uses are already represented in the Old English citation record.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Did hatia mean only inward hatred?
No. Hofmann and Popkema give hate or reject, damage, and a feud-language expression for harming or pursuing someone as an enemy. The corpus records include road and legal-adversity contexts beside theological hate.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Could hatia concern damaging or hindering a road?
Yes in the reviewed legal records. The Register to Jus Municipale Frisonum pairs hatijen with hindrien on the army road, and the Book of Rudolf places hatie in a ban concerning that road.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Can the six-hit result measure ordinary medieval speech?
No. Corpus Oudfries is a surviving-text corpus dominated by legal and related manuscripts, not a random sample or recording of spoken frequency.
resolvedprobableposition text
How did a reciprocal stranger become an enemy?
Early Latin hostis referred to a foreigner or legally recognized outsider before later Roman usage restricted it to a hostile outsider or enemy.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Is English law the source of legal—or vice versa?
No. Law comes through Old English lagu from Scandinavian; legal comes through Anglo-French and Latin legalis from lēx. Their shared modern subject matter is not an immediate genealogical relationship.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 4
RANK 191GRADE Aexact ranked word
Legal is not descended from English law.
The meanings meet; the family trees do not. legal is Latin, while law is Germanic and Scandinavian.
RANK 44GRADE Aranked reveal
One corpus hit written hatia is not the hate verb at all.
The May 2026 Corpus Oudfries search returns six records under word or lemma hatia, but spelling alone creates a trap. In Brokmer B 101, Buma explicitly identifies hatia as atia "rear" with prothetic h; Nijdam's translation confirms a poor mother unable to feed her children. That token is excluded from the hate lineage. The five relevant records then reveal the genuine verb's own range: harm or hindrance on an army road, legal adversity, and God hating perjury, lying speech, and false witnesses. The contrarian truth is therefore philological twice over: one identical surface belongs elsewhere, while the inherited verb itself extends beyond private feeling.
RANK 163GRADE Aranked reveal
The enemy was once the stranger.
Older Latin hostis named a foreigner or legally recognized outsider. Roman authors themselves explain how usage narrowed toward the armed or public enemy.
RANK 183GRADE A−contrarian claim
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.
042
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
053
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
DIRECTLY INSPECTEDprinted book
John Harris’s FEE-FARM entry uses Legal to mark the specifically legal sense of the term.
legal / legal / 1704
Lexicon technicum: or, an universal English dictionary of arts and sciencesexact attested form / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexicographic first use
English lexical record
legal / legal / 15th century
Legal — Word Historyexact attested form / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Latin legal and literary record
lēx / legal / Roman antiquity
Logeion: lexreporting 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.