820 canonical forms + 578 route stages.
THE TIMELINE ATLAS
JOURNEY ATLAS ↗FORM / ROUTE / BOUND
1398 REVIEWED EVENTSLANGUAGE
IN TIME.
One cross-word chronology for every defensibly bounded form and journey stage—without converting a vague historical label into a fake year.
A reviewed graph bound, not a claim of an earliest human word.
Only stages with directly cited numeric bounds enter this atlas.
Labels remain visible in Journey Atlas, but not parsed into false years.
003 MATCHING EVENTS
FILTER THE CHRONOLOGY
WHEN DID THE EVIDENCE LAND?
TWO CLOCKS.
NO FALSE PRECISION.
FORM CHRONOLOGY dates a canonical linguistic form or reconstruction in the lexical graph.
ROUTE CHRONOLOGY dates a geographic or transmission stage in a word’s journey.
They can share an era band, but they are never silently treated as the same kind of claim.
CROSS-WORD CHRONOLOGY / EARLIEST BOUND FIRST
THE EVIDENCE IN TIME
Medieval3 ON THIS PAGE
BEFORE 1101 CEbefore
ROUTE STAGEAnglo-Saxon England
clew
Old English, before the 12th century
Old English cliewen names the ball or wound thread behind later clew.
1 EVIDENCE LINK
The numeric ceiling represents the source's before-the-12th-century horizon, not a first spoken use.
AUDIT RECORD ↗1100 CE →open
ROUTE STAGEGlobal English
clew
literal and nautical survival to today
Clew survives beside clue; clue dominates the figurative evidence sense while clew remains required in nautical uses.
1 EVIDENCE LINK
The open interval begins at the reviewed English horizon; it does not date every sense or spelling separately.
AUDIT RECORD ↗1100 CE–1500 CErange
ROUTE STAGEMedieval England
clew
Middle English, c. 1100–1500
Middle English clewe / clew continues the literal thread-ball word.
1 EVIDENCE LINK
The interval is the dossier's historical-language range, not a claim that every spelling persisted uniformly.
AUDIT RECORD ↗UNBOUNDED IS
A REAL RESULT.
Stages without source-backed numeric bounds stay in their complete Journey Atlas route, carry an explicit temporal note, and remain absent here until the evidence supports normalization. The missing point is visible work—not permission to guess.