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Find a modern word—or search sideways through reconstructed roots, historical forms, meanings, languages, scholars, sources, claims, disputes, and witnesses.
013
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
adjectiveexact headword
legible
Capable of being read or deciphered; from Late Latin legibilis and Latin legere “to read.”
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 ↗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 ↗022
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
●
Present-Day English / Indo-European
legible
capable of being read or deciphered; later also discernible or understandable
- DATE
- 15th century–today
- MATCH
- exact historical form
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Middle English / Indo-European
legible
capable of being read
- DATE
- Middle English, late 14th–15th century
- MATCH
- exact historical form
- DOSSIERS
- 1
033
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 2
openproposedexact word
Is *leǵ- the only published deepest root shape?
No. Latin legere is traditionally compared with *leǵ-, while *sleǵ- remains a published alternative.
resolvedestablishedexact word
Did legible begin as a word for general understandability?
The secure formation is literal reading: Late Latin legibilis from legere “to read.” Discernible and understandable are later or extended senses, not the morphological source.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 1
RANK 197GRADE A−exact ranked word
Legible belongs to gathering and reading.
Late Latin legibilis means able to be read and comes from legere, the Latin gather, select, and read family.
043
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
historical dictionary7 CLAIM LINKS
Legible — Definition, Word History, and First Known Use
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary4 CLAIM LINKS
Legible — Origin and history
Douglas Harper / 2026
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary6 CLAIM LINKS
American Heritage Dictionary: legible
American Heritage Dictionary Editors / 2022
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗051
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
06
SEARCH IS DISCOVERY, NOT PROOF
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