friend: [OE] Etymologically, friend means ‘loving’. It and its Germanic relatives (German freund, Dutch vriend, Swedish frände, etc) go back to the present participle of the prehistoric Germanic verb *frijōjan ‘love’ (historically, the German present participle ends in -nd, as in modern German -end; English -ng is an alteration of this). *Frijōjan itself was a derivative of the adjective *frijaz, from which modern English gets free, but which originally meant ‘dear, beloved’. => free
