In medical texts find: "pissade",[4]"fetide",[4]"laureole";[4]"spatule fetide";[4] (the source text that can be most narrowly dated is a manuscript of Roger of Salerno (c. 1240) Chirurgia).[full citation needed]
— within parallels that English has to the fœtid, such as acid, arid, avid, placid, rabid, rapid, sapid, squalid, valid, vapid; gelid, intrepid, tepid; frigid, insipid, liquid, livid, rigid, timid, viscid, vivid; florid, solid, and stolid. The stressed syllable's vowel likewise has its short value. Or rather, had one of its short values, in the special case where either a preceding /w/ or a following /r/ has created a special short value.
Consider squalid, florid, and / or arid in certain dialects: The syllable did not lie in one of the word's two final syllables – as is straightforwardly shown for these words by comparing their cognate French spellings: aride, avide, insipide, liquide, livide, etc. Whether the word contained a final -e does not matter for the parallels whose stressed syllable had (not a monophthong but) a diphthong. That includes words such as humid, lurid, lucid, pellucid, putrid, stupid, and tumid, since Middle English dialects save in the Southwest had lost the vowel-sound [y] from their sound-systems, and so the Middle-English ancestors of our Modern-Standard dialects used in any open syllable as closest approximation to that sound of the French the diphthong which they spelled in non-Romance words as iw or similar.
Because of using a Middle-English diphthong, distance from word-end did not cause the sound to vary.) Dobson[2]: 711 notes however:
"... that this was the only development is difficult, though not impossible, to reconcile with the rarity, in the fourteenth century, of the inverted spelling u(e) for the native diphthong [iu] and with the fact that cultivated poets like Chaucer and Gower rhyme O[ld ]Fr[ench] [y] with native [iu] relatively seldom, especially considering the usefulness of such rhymes,[5] therefore suggests that in cultivated speech the pronunciation [y:] was maintained."
