Dictionary of Old English Basic Searches

Dictionary of Old English Basic Searches

DOE

How to use the Dictionary of Old English to look up Old English and Modern English words.

Alexandra Bolintineanu

Welcome to the Dictionary of Old English. The Dictionary of Old English (DOE) defines the earliest form of the English language, spoken and written between 600 and 1150 AD. This video shows you how to use the Dictionary of Old English to carry out basic research tasks. You’ll learn how to look up an OE word how to look up a modern English word All right: Let’s get started. First, let’s look up an OE word. The DOE defines Old English words from A to G. Suppose you want to look up the Old English word gefnesan. Select “Headword” from the drop-down menu. Then enter your word, gefnesan, in the next search box. Please use lower case letters; some capital letters—A as in apple, D as in Delta, and T as in Tango—always appear as special Old English characters Æ (Ash), Ð (Eth), and þ (Thorn). Once you’ve typed in your word, click “Search”. The entry with the word’s definition appears on the right-hand side: “gefnesan” means “to sneeze.” Old English uses the letters Æ (Ash), Ð (Eth), and þ (Thorn). What if your word contains these special characters? Use capital letters to enter them into the DOE search box. Let`s take the word ælþeodig: type capital A for Ash, capital T for thorn. If you can`t find a match, then your word may be defined under another spelling. To find it, select “Attested Spelling” from the drop-down menu. This will let you look at all word forms that exist in the corpus and that are related to defined words. And success: aeltheodig means foreign. You have successfully looked up two Old English words. But what if you want to do the opposite—look up a modern English word in Old English? In that case, select “Definition” from the drop-down menu. Enter your Modern English word (let’s say ‘sneeze’) in the search box. And there you go: gefnesan is the Old English word you are looking for. Using the Definition field, you can look up a simple and specific term, like ‘sneeze.’ Or you can explore the semantic field of a term with more wide-ranging connections. For example, ‘wife’ appears in the definitions of a range of Old English words, describing a wife, marriage, betrothal, family relationships—but also repudiation, divorce, and the severing of domestic ties. You’ve seen how to carry out basic searches for Old English and Modern English terms. Join us in further videos to learn more advanced features and techniques of the Dictionary of Old English.