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.
016
MODERN ENTRY POINTS
WORD DOSSIERS
nounexact headword
truth
Conformity with fact or reality; inherited through Old English trēowþ, whose recorded semantic field includes fidelity, loyalty, and constancy.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗verbcontrarian claim
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 ↗nouncontrarian claim
etymologist
A specialist in etymology; an English agent noun formed on etymology with -ist.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗nouncontrarian claim
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 ↗nouncontrarian claim
troth
Pledged fidelity, good faith, or betrothal; a surviving historical twin of truth rather than a later poetic fabrication.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗adjective · adverbhistorical form
ἐτεός
A Homeric Greek true-word related to ἔτυμος and ἐτήτυμος, with a proposed prehistory in *set-eu-o- and *set-u-.
OPEN THE FULL LINEAGE ↗026
ATTESTED / RECONSTRUCTED / BOUNDARY
HISTORICAL FORMS
●
Present-Day English / Indo-European
truth
conformity to fact or reality; sincerity; fidelity
- DATE
- before 12th century–today
- MATCH
- exact historical form
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Proto-Germanic / Indo-European
*treuwithō
faith, loyalty, truth
- DATE
- Proto-Germanic horizon
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 3
Middle English / Indo-European
trewthe
loyalty, fidelity, truth
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
Middle English / Indo-European
trouth
truth, troth, pledged fidelity
- DATE
- Middle English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 2
Old English / Indo-European
trēowþ
faith, loyalty, fidelity, truth
- DATE
- Old English
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 3
Ancient Greek / Indo-European
ἐτεός
eteósin accordance with truth; true; really
- DATE
- Homeric and later Ancient Greek
- MATCH
- gloss
- DOSSIERS
- 1
0320
WHERE INTERPRETATION IS TESTED
CLAIMS & DISPUTES
SCHOLARLY DISPUTES / 10
resolvedestablishedexact word
Was truth first only correspondence with fact?
No. Merriam-Webster reports the earliest located English use under fidelity or constancy, while modern truth also covers factual correspondence.
resolvedestablishedexact word
Is *deru- a written ancestral word?
No. The asterisk marks a reconstructed comparative form rather than an attested token.
openprobableposition text
Is betroth built on truth or troth?
The historical base is Middle English trouth or trouthe, where the modern truth and troth spellings were not yet cleanly separated; mapping it to only one modern headword overstates the evidence.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does -logy simply mean “the study of”?
No. Merriam-Webster gives oral or written expression as one sense and doctrine, theory, or science as another; American Heritage separately gives discourse or expression and science, theory, or study. “Study of” is a useful reading in many formations, not a universal historical definition.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does every modern Feind literally mean one who hates?
No. The participial source is historical morphology. Modern Duden senses include personal enemy, hostile power or force, and a determined opponent of something without requiring a recoverable emotion in every token.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Is the Roman tenth-member story invented?
No. The Latin and historical punishment sense is real; the error is using etymology to ban later English meanings.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does etymological mean correct because of a word’s origin?
No. Etymology is a word’s historical development, distinct from its current definition; origin does not legislate present meaning.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Must an etymon be the deepest reconstructable root?
No. Merriam-Webster defines it as an earlier same-language or ancestral form, a foreign loan source, or a word or morpheme used in composition or derivation.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Does the six-cell table preserve the complete Old Dutch paradigm?
No. It attests nominative and genitive singular plus nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative plural. Unrecorded cells must not be invented.
resolvedestablishedposition text
Did taboo originally mean only “forbidden”?
No. The Tongan reflexes and wider Oceanic reconstruction carry a semantic field that includes prohibited, under ritual restriction, sacred, holy, and consecrated.
CONTRARIAN TRUTHS / 10
RANK 2GRADE Aexact ranked word
Truth began with firmness and fidelity.
Before truth centered factual correspondence, its family named what was firm, faithful, and steadfast.
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 39GRADE Aranked reveal
Old Norse fjándi was an enemy before it was the Devil.
Cleasby and Vigfússon identify the inherited -nd- shape as participial and gloss the older formation as properly a hater. Their first sense is the ordinary enemy; only after the introduction of Christianity does the historical account assign fjándi the fiend branch. ONP then reveals how far the word traveled: 222 citations across enemy, demon, evil spirit, pagan god, Satan, and derogatory uses for hated or bewitched beings and things. The truth is not that every enemy secretly hates. It is that a lexicalized agent noun became an ordinary social category, then accumulated new religious and expressive work.
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 54GRADE Aranked reveal
vriend and vijand are loving-one and hating-one mirror fossils—not cognates.
EWN, WNT, and MNW independently analyze vriend as an old present participle of the Germanic verb to love. EWN explicitly compares the formation of vijand, whose reviewed ancestry follows a different hate verb. Modern /vrint/ also makes visible how far living pronunciation can move from historical spelling. The real truth is a shared grammatical blueprint with distinct roots, not a manufactured story of one word dividing into friend and enemy.
RANK 80GRADE Aranked reveal
“True” is not yet “etymology.”
Greek ἔτυμος meant true, real, or actual. A neuter technical noun and then the compound ἐτυμολογία had to turn truth into an inquiry about words.
RANK 85GRADE Aranked reveal
“Etymological” did not first mean scientific.
The earliest source-reported French use around 1550 describes names that reveal their “true sense.” The modern adjective’s relation-to-a-discipline sense arrived over a much older truth-seeking metaphor.
RANK 101GRADE Acontrarian claim
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 103GRADE Acontrarian claim
Tree and truth meet at firmness, not fantasy.
Tree follows the wood branch through Germanic *trewam; truth follows the fidelity branch through *treuwaz and *treuwithō. They meet at *deru- “firm, solid, steadfast; wood, tree.”
RANK 154GRADE Acontrarian claim
Truth and troth were once one word family in plain sight.
Middle English trouth and Old English trēowþ covered truth, faith, loyalty, and pledged fidelity before the modern words specialized.
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BOOKS / DICTIONARIES / ARTICLES / DATABASES
SOURCES
051
FIRST USES & HISTORICAL OBJECTS
ATTESTATION WITNESSES
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.