This should be taken as approximate, especially before about 1700, since a word may have been used in conversation for hundreds of years before it turns up in a manuscript that has had the good fortune to survive the centuries.
The dates beside a word indicate the earliest year for which there is a surviving written record of that word (in English, unless otherwise indicated). Etymologies are not definitions they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.
This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English.
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