Etymology 1
Inherited from Northern Middle English fede, feide, from Old French faide, feide, fede, from Proto-West Germanic *faihiþu (“hatred, enmity”) (corresponding to foe + -th), from Proto-Indo-European *peyḱ- (“hostile”).
Cognate to Old English fǣhþ, fǣhþu, fǣhþo (“hostility, enmity, violence, revenge, vendetta”), German Fehde, and Dutch vete (“feud”) (directly inherited from Proto-West Germanic) alongside Danish fejde (“feud, enmity, hostility, war”) and Swedish fejd (“feud, controversy, quarrel, strife”) (borrowed from Middle Low German).
- fead, feaud, fede, feood, fewd, fewde, fuide, fude (obsolete)
Noun
feud (plural feuds)
- A state of long-standing mutual hostility.
2008 June 29, Celia Mcgee, “The Greeks Hoist the Dramatic Flag of Scotland”, in The New York Times:Mr. Cumming’s Dionysus in “The Bacchae” is conceived as a rock star, the rhythm-and-blues Maenads as his backup singers and groupies, and his feud with his cousin Pentheus, king of Thebes, as an encounter of the hedonistic, ambigendered, exotic Other, with “the fear of letting that into your culture,” Mr. Tiffany said.
2015, “Arunachal Pradesh”, in H. M. Bareh, editor, Encyclopaedia Of North-East India, 1st edition, Mittal Publications, →ISBN, archived from the original on 2022-11-11, page 72:The feuds between Namsang and Borduria continued. In 1875-76 the dispute between the Namsang and Borduria arose about the buffaloes which were carried off by Borduria people from Namsang areas.
- (professional wrestling) A staged rivalry between wrestlers.
- (obsolete) A combination of kindred to avenge injuries or affronts, done or offered to any of their blood, on the offender and all his race.
Usage notes
The modern pronunciation /fjuːd/ has been described as "unexplained"[2] and "hard to account for";[3] the expected form would be fead, fede /fiːd/. Several explanations have been suggested for the change in pronunciation, but none has met with unanimous approval.
(Possible explanations):
- Dobson posits that Northern Middle English fede was reanalysed as a contraction of *fahede; on this model, a form *fahode was created by replacing the suffix -hede (“hood”) with its variant -hode. When this was borrowed into the Early Modern standard language, it would be pronounced /ˈfɛːhʊd/, which was then contracted to /fɛʊ̯d/. This would regularly yield /fjuːd/.[4]
- Malone suggests that the modern pronunciation results from a misreading of fead as *feod, pointing out that such a spelling pronunciation could develop since the word was originally a literary borrowing from Northern English dialects and therefore "belonged to the written, and not the spoken, language".[3]
- Most accounts assume that fede cannot develop into feud without some kind of remodelling. However, it may be that in some dialects, fede would regularly yield a form that speakers of standard Early Modern English would approximate as feaud, feood, feud, fuide, etc. This initially seems improbable, but according to the Survey of English Dialects, many traditional dialects reflect Middle English /ɛː/ (as in fede /ˈfɛːd(ə)/) as a diphthong such as /ɛə/, /ɪʊ/ or /jʌ/ (e.g. Herefordshire beam /bjʊm/).[5][6]
- Traditionally, the change was attributed to the influence of Etymology 2, but as noted by the OED, the influence of that word is improbable; forms indicating a pronunciation of the /fjuːd/ type first occur some 50 years before Etymology 2 is attested; even once it appears, it is a rare term of art. Furthermore, the influence of that word cannot account for Early Modern English forms like feood, feaud, and there is no obvious reason why one word would influence the other; any semantic connection is tenuous at best.[2]
Translations
A state of long-standing mutual hostility
- Albanian: hasmëri (sq)
- Azerbaijani: ədavət
- Bulgarian: кръ́вна вражда́ f (krǎ́vna vraždá), вражда́ (bg) f (vraždá)
- Catalan: hostilitat (ca) f, baralla (ca) f
- Chechen: please add this translation if you can
- Chinese:
- Hokkien: sè-siû
- Mandarin: 爭執 / 争执 (zh) (zhēngzhí), 世仇 (zh) (shìchóu)
- Czech: svár (cs) m
- Dutch: vete (nl) f, wraak (nl) f
- Finnish: vihanpito (fi)
- French: querelle (fr) f, dispute (fr) f, (historical) faide (fr) f
- Georgian: შუღლი (šuɣli), მტრობა (mṭroba), უსიამოვნება (usiamovneba)
- German: Fehde (de) f, Streit (de) m, Feindschaft (de) f
- Greek: έριδα (el) f (érida)
- Hungarian: viszály (hu), összetűzés (hu)
- Italian: faida (it) f
- Japanese: 確執 (ja) (かくしつ, kakushitsu), フェーデ (fēde)
- Latin: simultās f, hostilitas f
- Malay: persengketaan, permusuhan (ms), perseteruan
- Norwegian: feide (no) m
- Ossetian: змур (zmur), быцӕу (bycæw)
- Polish: wróżda (pl) f, waśń (pl) f
- Portuguese: rixa (pt) f
- Russian: раздо́р (ru) m (razdór), разла́д (ru) m (razlád), вражда́ (ru) f (vraždá), междоусо́бица (ru) f (meždousóbica)
- Scots: feid
- Serbo-Croatian: zavada (sh) f
- Slovak: zvar m
- Spanish: rivalidad (es) f, pelea (es) f, enemistad (es) f, hostilidad (es) f, contienda (es) f, pleito (es) m, desavenencia (es) f
- Swedish: fejd (sv) c
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A staged rivalry between wrestlers
Translations to be checked
Verb
feud (third-person singular simple present feuds, present participle feuding, simple past and past participle feuded)
- (intransitive) To carry on a feud.
The two men began to feud after one of them got a job promotion and the other thought he was more qualified.
2002, John F. Molinaro, edited by Jeff Marek and Dave Meltzer, Top 100 Pro Wrestlers of All Time, Toronto, Ont.: Winding Stair Press, →ISBN, page 78, column 1:As a result of the heel turn, [Riki] Choshu was instantly elevated as a headliner and feuded with [Tatsumi] Fujinami in main events for two years over the WWF [World Wrestling Federation] International Heavyweight strap.
2024 August 28, Raven Smith, “Liam Gallagher, Noel Gallagher, and the Art of the Public Feud”, in Vogue:Don’t look back in anger—Oasis, the prodigal sons of Brit-pop, is returning. After years of public feuding and subtweets and alleged battery with a cricket bat, the Gallagher brothers—Liam and Noel, obvs—are working it out on the remix, with a rash of 2025 summer dates announced on their website.
References
Dobson, E. J. (1957) English pronunciation 1500-1700, second edition, volume II: Phonology, Oxford: Clarendon Press, published 1968, →OCLC, § 244, page 799: “Hodges (four times) and Price give ME ęu in feud, which is of dubious origin; their evidence is supported by Holland’s spelling feaud (1601).”. Kemp Malone (1939) “Notes and news”, in English Studies, volume 29, numbers 1-6, →DOI E. J. Dobson (1956) “The Word Feud”, in The Review of English Studies, volume VII, number 25, →DOI, pages 52–54 Peter M. Anderson (1987) A structural atlas of the English dialects, Beckenham: Croom Helm, →ISBN, pages 65, 76, 119 Clive Upton, David Parry, J. D. A. Widdowson (1994) Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and Grammar, Psychology Press, →ISBN