British Literature - Medieval & Renaissance: Old/Middle English Language

The Dictionary of Old English (DOE) defines the vocabulary of the first centuries (600-1150 A.D.) of the English language. The DOE complements the Middle English Dictionary (which covers the period 1100-1500 A.D.) and the Oxford English Dictionary, the three together providing a full description of the vocabulary of English.

The goal of Arthur Borden, Jr.'s dictionary is to provide as nearly complete a list of Old-English words as possible, and to "list them in all discernible shades of meaning" as possible.

Since 1898, Bosworth-Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary has been the primary lexical reference for study of the Anglo-Saxon language. The printed monograph was digitized under the direction of Sean Crist, with funding provided by Joel Dean grants, at Swarthmore College.

The print Middle English Dictionary (PE 679.M54), now complete, has been described as "the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America." Its 15,000 pages offer a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500, based on the analysis of a collection of over three million citation slips, the largest collection of this kind available. This electronic version of the MED preserves all the details of the print MED, but goes far beyond this, by converting its contents into an enormous database, searchable in ways impossible within any print dictionary.

Scanned images of the pages of Clark Hall's A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Second Edition (1916).