What's the earliest reference to a non-article word that still exists today?
The earliest substantial English text is Cædmon’s Hymn, generally dated to 657-684. Here’s a ‘normalized’ text from a Harper College professor’s website. The interlineated ‘translation’ is my own using modern descendants of the OE forms where I recognized them; these are boldfaced.
(My genitives aren't always in the original; they're just there to help the sense. I greyed back onstælde/installed because install actually came into English from Mediaeval Latin via Old French; but the Latin word is constructed from a Germanic root cognate with ModE stall.)
As you see, some two thirds of the words are still in use. Not one article in the lot, either!