Dictionary of Old English - Parts of an Entry

Dictionary of Old English - Parts of an Entry

DOE

How to navigate the parts of a DOE entry.

Alexandra Bolintineanu

May-14

CC-BY

English

Welcome to the Dictionary of Old English, which defines the earliest form of the English language, spoken and written between 600 and 1150 AD. This video shows you how to navigate entries in the Dictionary of Old English. You’ll learn how to select an entry, what the parts of an entry are, and what to do with the evidence in each part. Let’s get started. You’ve seen how to do basic searches in our first video. You can also scroll through the dictionary’s entries in alphabetical order. The word wheel is just below the search screen. Click on a letter to display its entries. Let’s pick one sample entry -- “goldsmith” -- and go through its components. First, the headword is the word defined by a dictionary entry, the word that a dictionary entry is all about. Next up, grammatical information about the word: part of speech, grammatical gender if it’s a noun, strong or weak if it’s a noun or verb. Very occasionally, you’ll also find etymological information. Next, attested Spellings: these are all forms of our headword that are recorded in the DOE Web Corpus. Next, occurrence: how often the headword occurs in the corpus, and how it is used: is it mainly a poetic term? Or does it usually appear in medical texts, laws, glossaries, charters? Is it a word mostly used in the north of England? Is it mostly used by one author, such as Wulfstan or Ælfric? Are there other patterns in its usage, in terms of date of MS, or dialect, or region, or genre of text? Goldsmið, since it has no restriction noted, seems to be general Old English. Next, citations: the evidence behind the definitions. Every sense of every word is illustrated with citations from the DOE Corpus. Click on the hyperlink at the beginning of a citation—which is the citation reference--to see where a citation comes from: you’ll see the bibliographical information for the text, its full title, and the edition used by the DOE. For example, take this citation: A list of occupations in Latin is glossed in Old English; the word goldsmið translates aurifex, goldsmith, distinguishing it from with other kinds of smiths and craftsmen, such as smiths, iron smiths, silver smiths, ore smiths, and wood workers. If you click on the hyperlink, you see that the citation comes from Ælfric’s Colloquy, edited by Garmonsway. At the bottom, each entry has the equivalent of footnotes: references to related material beyond just the headword. For Old English related words, see Cross Reference: this shows you Old English words related to the headword. For Latin related words, see Latin Cross Reference: this shows you Latin equivalents for the headword drawn from manuscripts with Old English text and the parallel Latin source, like the Rule of St. Benedict. For related words in other dictionaries, see Secondary Cross Reference. ‘Goldsmith,’ for example, has related entries in the Middle English Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. This allows you to trace the word across the entire history of English. Finally, in some entries you may find Additional material or Parenthetical material. The first has editorial notes on the entry, while the second has notes on the citations. Now that you know the parts of an entry in the DOE, you can navigate entries and fully use their evidence. If you ever want more information about part of an entry, go to the top menu in the DOE interface and click on “Sample Entry.” Then click on the red bullets to uncover information about each part of an entry. Happy searching with the Dictionary of Old English.