GRAPH-WIDE SEARCH
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
nounexact headword
tea
The English name of the beverage, carried through the Dutch maritime network from a Southern Min form of the Chinese word 茶.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verbhistorical form
betroth
To promise in marriage; a Middle English prefixed formation built on the same historical noun that yielded truth and troth.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounhistorical form
calculator
A person or device that calculates, inherited from a medieval human-reckoner word and the Latin counting-pebble family.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
chai
In current English, a South Asian-style tea commonly prepared with milk and spices; the word belongs to the overland cha/chay transmission family ultimately derived from Chinese 茶.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noundossier summary
chá
The Portuguese word for tea, a European cha-type form associated with sixteenth-century Portuguese contact through Macao rather than the Dutch te-type route.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Gothic class-III weak-verb lemmadossier summary
hatan
A Gothic weak verb conventionally glossed hate, represented by exactly two currently reported corpus tokens: hatandane in Luke 1:71 and hatandans in Luke 6:27. Both are present participles; no surviving token writes the normalized infinitive. Their translation behavior defeats a one-word gloss: Luke 1 uses fijandam for enemies and hatandane for those hating, while Luke 6 uses hatandans for enemies and fijandam for those hating. Project Wulfila keeps class-III hatan separate from class-I hatjan, Braune calls the forms conjugational fluctuation, Orel publishes a reconstructed class-III alternation, and Sturtevant argues that the hatan shape may instead be a specifically Gothic secondary formation.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Saxon masculine i-stem noundossier summary
heti
Old Saxon heti is an attested noun, not a reconstructed Proto-Germanic form. Köbler prints the normalized citation form hėti* with a trailing asterisk, then gives three cited lexical loci whose inflections produce five witness readings: accusative singular heti at Heliand 1322 in manuscripts M, C, and V; dative singular heti at Genesis 60; and genitive singular hetias in the tenth-century Saxon Confession. No nominative singular appears in that inventory, but the exact surface heti is visibly written in Munich Cgm 25. The directly inspected Heliand line places the noun in the Beatitudes, where righteous people endure rîkioro manno heti endi harmquidi, powerful men's hostility or persecution and hostile speech. The Saxon Confession instead places hetias beside malice, envy, and slander among confessed wrongs. Those contexts establish a range broader than one private feeling without proving that persecution was the prehistoric root meaning. Fulk and Köbler analyze the Old Saxon comparison as an i-stem; Pfeifer describes the wider Germanic noun as an old es/os-stem, so the inherited morphological account remains public rather than falsely harmonized.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old English weak-verb lemmadossier summary
hettan
An Old English weak-verb lemma supported by a strikingly narrow surface record. A full-corpus lemmatisation inventory lists only hettende under hettan; Bosworth–Toller redirects the bare headword to hettend, “enemy,” while Orel compares the verb with Gothic hatjan and Middle High German hetzen. Clark Hall instead assigns hettende to hatian. The dossier therefore separates the comparative verb, the recorded enemy word, and the unresolved lemma assignment.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗Old Saxon adjectivecontrarian claim
hōti
Old Saxon hōti is a normalized adjective headword supported by three Heliand loci and five reported witness readings: nominative plural hotie in manuscript M and huotia in C at line 5183; accusative singular hotean in M and huotian in C at line 5246; and nominative singular huoti in C at line 5285. The Munich forms hotie and hotean are directly visible in Cgm 25 scans 150 and 152; the three Cotton readings remain source-reported. Köbler nevertheless prints hōti* with a trailing star, so the mark cannot be reduced to “no nominative exists”: the same entry explicitly reports nominative huoti. The deeper genealogy splits. UT groups hōti with the inherited hate family under Pokorny's k̑ād- “hate, displeasure, uneasiness”; Köbler cross-references hatōn as a headword but gives the adjective a distinct etymology through Germanic *hwōtja- beside *hwōtō “threat” and Pokorny's *kʷē̆d- / *kʷō̆d- complex “bore, prick, stab,” whose wider reflexes include whetting and inciting. The graph preserves both lanes. It does not turn hostile intent into a timeless essence, infer exact pronunciation from spelling, or pretend that a dictionary cross-reference settles ancestry.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗noundossier summary
sauna
The English name of a Finnish steam bath, borrowed from Finnish sauna; its deeper Finnic history is secure enough to reconstruct, while a proposed ancient Germanic source remains actively qualified.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounhistorical form
tree
A perennial woody plant; inherited through Old English trēow and Germanic *trewam from the firmness-and-wood branch of *deru-.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nounhistorical form
troth
Pledged fidelity, good faith, or betrothal; a surviving historical twin of truth rather than a later poetic fabrication.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗0212
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
●
Present-Day English / Indo-European
tea
the leaves of Camellia sinensis or a beverage made by infusing them
- DATE
- 1655–today
- MATCH
- exact historical form
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Proto-Indo-European / Indo-European
*deru-
*deru- / *dreu-be firm, solid, steadfast; wood, tree
- DATE
- Proto-Indo-European horizon
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 7
Middle Chinese (reconstructed reading) / Sino-Tibetan
*drae
tea; name of a plant
- DATE
- Middle Chinese reconstruction
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 5
Proto-Indo-European / Indo-European
*drew-o-
firm or steadfast formation; wood or pledge branch
- DATE
- Proto-Indo-European suffixed variant
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 2
Latin / Indo-European
calculātor
a teacher of arithmetic; a calculating person
- DATE
- Latin antiquity and Late Latin
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
chai
a tea beverage commonly prepared with spices, milk, and sweetener
- DATE
- 1984–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Portuguese / Indo-European
chá
tea plant, leaves, infusion, and related current senses
- DATE
- Portuguese record–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Present-Day English / Indo-European
sauna
a Finnish-style steam bath or the room in which it is taken
- DATE
- 1881–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Dutch / Indo-European
thee
tea
- DATE
- 17th century–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Middle English / Indo-European
trewe
faithful, steadfast, true
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Turkish / Turkic
çay
tea plant, leaves, beverage, and later social-event senses
- DATE
- Turkey Turkish record–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Russian / Indo-European
чай
čajtea
- DATE
- Russian record–today
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
0324
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 12
openprobableexact word
Did English tea pass through Dutch?
WALS describes a Dutch-mediated European route, while Merriam-Webster compresses the etymology to borrowing from Xiamen Chinese dé. The displayed Dutch stage is probable, not silently declared unanimous.
resolvedestablishedexact word
Does every language follow a simple sea-versus-land rule?
No. WALS documents a powerful distributional tendency, not a universal law: 110 sampled languages have Sinitic cha-derived forms, 84 have Min Nan te-derived forms, and 36 belong to neither class.
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 every early fīend- form arise from inherited i-mutation?
Not necessarily. OED notes that especially in early Mercian, some apparently mutated stems may instead have been re-formed after the present participle of fēon.
openspeculativeposition text
When did fēogan cease to be an ordinary verb?
The reviewed evidence does not establish one last-use date or a complete Middle English continuation. The trail therefore stops at the Old English written record instead of inventing an extinction year.
openprobableposition text
Did every early fīend- form arise from inherited i-mutation?
Not necessarily. OED notes that especially in early Mercian, some apparently mutated stems may instead have been re-formed after the present participle of fēon.
openproposedposition text
Was hatan inherited unchanged from Proto-Germanic?
Possibly, not securely. Orel publishes *xatēnan ~ *xatōjanan behind a Germanic cognate set. Sturtevant instead judges a specifically Gothic secondary origin more probable, and Braune records fluctuation with hatjan.
openprobableposition text
How should Ephesians 2:3 hatize and hatis be parsed?
The witnesses disagree in form and the analytical layers disagree in labeling. Project Wulfila’s current morphology lists A hatize as genitive plural and B hatis as nominative or accusative singular; Braune calls B hatis a consonantal genitive beside A hatizē, while Streitberg’s later teaching glossary calls genitive hatis erroneous.
openprobableposition text
Does persōna securely mean a mask through which sound passes?
No secure reviewed etymology derives it as Latin per plus sonāre. The historical sources instead report a probable Etruscan connection and treat the origin as difficult.
openboundaryposition text
Can the Greek-to-Latin adjective transfer be dated to one event?
Not from the reviewed sources. Merriam-Webster establishes Greek etymologikos behind Latin etymologicus, while CNRTL documents late Latin use in Diomedes; neither identifies one precisely dated borrowing event.
openprobableposition text
Which Turkic language directly supplied Russian чай?
Vasmer lists several Turkic comparanda and routes but does not reduce them to one uniquely established immediate donor.
openproposedposition text
Does ἐτεός securely prove *set-u-?
It supports the proposal, but the reconstructed preform, ablaut, and suffixation are not directly attested or unanimous.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 12
RANK 180GRADE A-ranked-word prefix
Tea and chai are the same word after different journeys.
Both routes ultimately reach Chinese 茶. The te-type form traveled especially through Southern Min and Dutch maritime networks; the cha/chai-type family spread especially overland. WALS shows this is a global tendency with real exceptions, not a perfect rule.
RANK 2GRADE Aranked reveal
Truth began with firmness and fidelity.
Before truth centered factual correspondence, its family named what was firm, faithful, and steadfast.
RANK 4GRADE Aranked reveal
Humility is an earth-and-lowness metaphor.
Latin humus “ground” produced humilis “low,” then humilitās “lowness,” before the moral virtue.
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 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 50GRADE Aranked reveal
The hostile adjective may belong to whet and threat, not hate—and its starred lemma still has a nominative.
Köbler's Old Saxon entry reports five written readings at three Heliand loci, including nominative hotie, huotia, and huoti, yet heads the entry hōti*. The asterisk therefore cannot be explained away as “no nominative survives.” More radically, the sources split at the root. UT groups hōti with hatōn and heti under the inherited hate etymon k̑ād-. Köbler's same entry cross-references hatōn but reconstructs a different *hwōtja- adjective beside *hwōtō “threat” and Pokorny's *kʷē̆d- / *kʷō̆d- family of boring, pricking, sharpening, whetting, and inciting. Munich hotie and hotean are directly visible in contexts of hostile minds and hostile intent; Cotton huotia, huotian, and huoti remain source-reported. The unveiling is not “hostility secretly means sharpened hate.” It is that rigorous etymology sometimes reveals two irreconcilable maps where a flat dictionary would print one arrow.
RANK 58GRADE A-ranked reveal
Medieval Hass could be friendly competition.
Grimm’s DWB quotes Erec 2059: riders pursue a hawking contest, friuntlîchen striten, and share a bescheiden haʒ. The dictionary interprets this as rivalry in pursuing a goal. Modern Duden instead centers intense aversion and hostility. The contrast reveals a real historical side meaning without claiming that every medieval use was friendly or that Liebe and Hass share ancestry.
RANK 59GRADE A-ranked reveal
Old Norse hatr has a 54-to-1 grammar problem.
The University of Copenhagen’s Dictionary of Old Norse Prose separates a 54-citation neuter noun from a one-citation masculine analysis—and flags the lone masculine assignment as possibly an elementary error. A directly inspected c.1150-1200 manuscript visibly preserves Hatr, but a visible token cannot settle gender by itself. The reveal is not that Old Norse had two equally secure hate nouns; it is that rigorous lexicography preserves the fracture instead of hiding it.
RANK 94GRADE Acontrarian claim
Chai is tea returning through another route.
The source-language forms behind English chai ordinarily mean tea. English specialized one returning member of the wider Chinese tea-word dispersal as a particular drink style.
RANK 100GRADE Acontrarian claim
True was steadfast before it was merely factual.
Old English trēowe meant faithful; its Germanic *treuwaz branch reaches reconstructed *deru- “firm, solid, steadfast; wood, tree.” Factual accuracy is real, but not the whole history.
RANK 101GRADE Aranked reveal
To betroth is to bind by one’s truth or troth.
Middle English bitrouthen visibly combines bi-/be- with trouth, the historical fidelity noun before modern truth and troth were cleanly separated.
RANK 102GRADE Aranked reveal
A truce was grammatically plural.
Modern singular truce continues Middle English trewes, the plural of an agreement noun from Old English trēow “fidelity.” A ceasefire is historically a set of pledged terms.
0412
BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
historical text edition5 CLAIM LINKS
Teaching Texts — Skírnismál
Skaldic Project editors
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical text edition4 CLAIM LINKS
Teaching Texts — Hýmiskviða
Skaldic Project editors
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary3 CLAIM LINKS
Tea — Definition and Word History
Merriam-Webster Editors / 2026
title prefixAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary48 CLAIM LINKS
Oudnederlands Woordenboek — fīunt
Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal editorial team / 2009
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary38 CLAIM LINKS
Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch — fîant, fîjant
Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch editorial team
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary35 CLAIM LINKS
Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch — fîên
Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch editorial team
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary32 CLAIM LINKS
Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm — hassen
Jacob Grimm · Wilhelm Grimm · DWDS editorial team / 2026
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗etymological dictionary29 CLAIM LINKS
DWDS — Feind, etymology after Wolfgang Pfeifer
Wolfgang Pfeifer · DWDS editorial team / 2026
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗etymological dictionary29 CLAIM LINKS
DWDS — Hass, etymology after Wolfgang Pfeifer
Wolfgang Pfeifer · DWDS editorial team / 2026
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗typological database26 CLAIM LINKS
Chapter 138: Tea
Östen Dahl / 2013
source titleAUDIT EVERY USE ↗etymological dictionary23 CLAIM LINKS
DWDS — Freund, etymology after Wolfgang Pfeifer
Wolfgang Pfeifer · DWDS editorial team / 2026
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗historical dictionary16 CLAIM LINKS
Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm — hasz, m.
Jacob Grimm · Wilhelm Grimm · DWDS editorial team / 2026
author or editorAUDIT EVERY USE ↗059
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
SOURCE REPORTEDlexicographic first use
Merriam-Webster first-known-use record for tea
tea / tea / First known use reported as 1655
Tea — Definition and Word Historyexact attested form / OPEN RECORD ↗DIRECTLY INSPECTEDmanuscript
Heliand manuscript M, accusation before Pilate
hōti / hōti / Heliand composition circa 830–840; Munich manuscript second half of the ninth century
Heliand — BSB Cgm 25, scan 152, hotean locuswitness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗DIRECTLY INSPECTEDmanuscript
Beowulf manuscript, foe’s footprint
fēond / fēond / late 10th or early 11th century
Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, folio 180v — Electronic Beowulf facsimilewitness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗DIRECTLY INSPECTEDprinted book
John Harris’s Lexicon technicum prints ETYMOLOGY as a headword and defines it as the part of grammar concerned with words’ origins and true signification.
etymology / etymology / 1704
Lexicon technicum: or, an universal English dictionary of arts and scienceswitness excerpt / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
John Shakespear dictionary entry reported by Faruqi
چائے / چائے / 1834 Shakespear dictionary record, source-reported
چا — Urdu spelling history of the tea wordreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Bīrūnī discussion of čāy
چای / چای / first half of the 11th century, source-reported
ČĀY — Teareporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Hýmiskviða 22
fjá / fjá / Old Norse normalized poetic text; source-reported
Teaching Texts — Hýmiskviðareporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Skírnismál 33
fjá / fjá / Old Norse normalized poetic text; source-reported
Teaching Texts — Skírnismálreporting source / OPEN RECORD ↗SOURCE REPORTEDlexical corpus record
Alexander's Letter to Aristotle, beloved teacher as friend
frēond / friend / Old English, source-reported
Oxford English Dictionary — friend, n. & adj.reporting 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.