"WI, adj. Haw., destitute, suffering, starving; s. starvation, famine; wiwi, lean, meagre; hoo-wiwi, to lessen, diminish.

Marqu., wiwi, poor, feeble; wiwi-i, solitude.

Tah., veve, poor, destitute, bare; v. to be in want.

Sanskr., vi, prep. 'compounded with verbs and nouns it implies: 1. separation; 2. privation; 3. wrongness, baseness', &c. (Benfey); as vi-deha, without body; vi-dharâ, without man, a widow; vi-dhantâ, poverty, without wealth.

Lat., ve or vi, in compound words, as ve-cors, without reason, frantic; ve-grandis, not large, small; ve-sanus, out of the senses, raving unsound; vi-duus, vi-dua, without husband or wife, widower, widow. Of other things, empty, void, without.

Goth, widuwo, A.-Sax., wuduwa, widow.

Benfey (Sanskr. Dict., s. v.) leads one to infer that vi is but an aphærsis of dui. It seems to me that the natural inference, and the natural turn of men's thoughts, would be that dui, two, implied addition rather than diminution. It is possible that the Sanskrit dui may have been 'worn down', as Professor Sayce calls it, to a preposition or mere affix, not only in the Sanskrit, but also in the Gothic and Latin; but with a substantial Polynesian wi still alive indicating destitution, deprivation, diminution, I incline to consider the latter as the base of, and proper relative to, the Sanskrit, Gothic, and Latin preposition or affix."

(Fornander)