Fand

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. An old or dialect past tense of the verb find, meaning discovered or came upon something
2. A archaic form of the past tense of find, used in older English and some regional speech for having located something
3. The obsolete past tense of find, signifying that a person had come across or discovered an object or fact

Etymology: "Fand" is a past-tense form, not a word with its own separate history. It is the first- and third-person singular preterite of the Old English verb "findan", meaning "to find", so in older English it was the ordinary way to say "found" for "I" or "he/she/it" in the past. Its ancestry runs straight back to the verb, which is one of the oldest and most stable parts of the English vocabulary. Over time, "fand" was pushed out of standard use by the regular "found" (from the Old English "funde" pattern), and it survived mainly in dialect and older writing. Seeing it today is a clear sign that the text is medieval or dialectal, where the verb still followed the older strong-verb pattern of changing its vowel rather than adding an ending.