essay old english meaning

History of English

Old English (c. 500 – c. 1100)

Invasions of Germanic Tribes

More important than the Celts and the Romans for the development of the English language, though, was the succession of invasions from continental Europe after the Roman withdrawal. No longer protected by the Roman military against the constant threat from the Picts and Scots of the North, the Celts felt themselves increasingly vulnerable to attack. Around 430AD, the ambitious Celtic warlord Vortigern invited the Jutish brothers Hengest and Horsa (from Jutland in modern-day Denmark), to settle on the east coast of Britain to form a bulwark against sea raids by the Picts, in return for which they were “allowed” to settle in the southern areas of Kent, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.

But the Jutes were not the only newcomers to Britain during this period. Other Germanic tribes soon began to make the short journey across the North Sea. The Angles (from a region called Angeln, the spur of land which connects modern Denmark with Germany) gradually began to settle in increasing numbers on the east coast of Britain, particularly in the north and East Anglia. The Frisian people, from the marshes and islands of northern Holland and western Germany, also began to encroach on the British mainland from about 450 AD onwards. Still later, from the 470s, the war-like Saxons (from the Lower Saxony area of north-western Germany) made an increasing number of incursions into the southern part of the British mainland. Over time, these Germanic tribes began to establish permanent bases and to gradually displace the native Celts.

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Short poem (“Butter, bread and green cheese”) and numbers 1-10 in modern Frisian (16 sec) (from Peter Meijes Tiersma ).

All these peoples all spoke variations of a West Germanic tongue, similar to modern Frisian, variations that were different but probably close enough to be mutually intelligible. The local dialect in Angeln is, at times, even today recognizably similar to English, and it has even more in common with the English of 1,000 years ago. Modern Frisian, especially spoken, bears an eerie resemblance to English, as can be seen by some of the Frisian words which were incorporated into English, like miel (meal), laam (lamb), goes (goose), bûter (butter), tsiis (cheese), see (sea), boat (boat), stoarm (storm), rein (rain), snie (snow), frieze (freeze), froast (frost), mist (mist), sliepe (sleep), blau (blue), trije (three), fjour (four), etc.

The influx of Germanic people was more of a gradual encroachment over several generations than an invasion proper, but these tribes between them gradually colonized most of the island, with the exception of the more remote areas, which remained strongholds of the original Celtic people of Britain. Originally sea-farers, they began to settle down as farmers, exploiting the rich English farmland. The rather primitive newcomers were if anything less cultured and civilized than the local Celts, who had held onto at least some parts of Roman culture. No love was lost between the two peoples, and there was little integration between them: the Celts referred to the European invaders as “barbarians” (as they had previously been labelled themselves); the invaders referred to the Celts as weales (slaves or foreigners), the origin of the name Wales.

Despite continued resistance (the legends and folklore of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table date from this time), the Celts were pushed further and further back by the invaders into the wilds of Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Ireland, although some chose to flee to the Brittany region of northern France (where they maintained a thriving culture for several centuries) and even further into mainland Europe. The Celtic language survives today only in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland, the Welsh of Wales, and the Breton language of Brittany (the last native speaker of the Cornish language died in 1777, and the last native speaker of Manx, a Celtic language spoken on the tiny Isle of Man, died as recently as the 1960s, and these are now dead languages).

The Germanic tribes settled in seven smaller kingdoms, known as the Heptarchy: the Saxons in Essex, Wessex and Sussex; the Angles in East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria; and the Jutes in Kent. Evidence of the extent of their settlement can be found in the number of place names throughout England ending with the Anglo-Saxon “-ing” meaning people of (e.g. Worthing , Reading , Hastings ), “-ton” meaning enclosure or village (e.g. Taunton , Burton , Luton ), “-ford” meaning a river crossing (e.g. Ashford , Bradford , Watford ) “-ham” meaning farm (e.g. Nottingham , Birmingham , Grantham ) and “-stead” meaning a site (e.g. Hampstead ).

Although the various different kingdoms waxed and waned in their power and influence over time, it was the war-like and pagan Saxons that gradually became the dominant group. The new Anglo-Saxon nation, once known in antiquity as Albion and then Britannia under the Romans, nevertheless became known as Anglaland or Englaland (the Land of the Angles), later shortened to England, and its emerging language as Englisc (now referred to as Old English or Anglo-Saxon, or sometimes Anglo-Frisian). It is impossible to say just when English became a separate language, rather than just a German dialect, although it seems that the language began to develop its own distinctive features in isolation from the continental Germanic languages, by around 600AD. Over time, four major dialects of Old English gradually emerged: Northumbrian in the north of England, Mercian in the midlands, West Saxon in the south and west, and Kentish in the southeast.

The Coming of Christianity and Literacy

Although many of the Romano-Celts in the north of England had already been Christianized, St. Augustine and his 40 missionaries from Rome brought Christianity to the pagan Anglo-Saxons of the rest of England in 597 AD. After the conversion of the influential King Ethelbert of Kent, it spread rapidly through the land, carrying literacy and European culture in it wake. Augustine was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 601 AD and several great monasteries and centres of learning were established particularly in Northumbria (e.g. Jarrow, Lindisfarne).

The Latin language the missionaries brought was still only used by the educated ruling classes and Church functionaries, and Latin was only a minor influence on the English language at this time, being largely restricted to the naming of Church dignitaries and ceremonies ( priest , vicar , altar , mass , church , bishop , pope , nun , angel , verse , baptism , monk , eucharist , candle , temple and presbyter came into the language this way). However, other more domestic words (such as fork , spade , chest , spider , school , tower , plant , rose , lily , circle , paper , sock , mat , cook , etc) also came into English from Latin during this time, albeit substantially altered and adapted for the Anglo-Saxon ear and tongue. More ecclesiastical Latin loanwords continued to be introduced, even as late as the 11th Century, including chorus , cleric , creed , cross , demon , disciple , hymn , paradise , prior , sabbath , etc.

“The Lord’s Prayer” in Old English (31 sec) .

Old English literature flowered remarkably quickly after Augustine’s arrival. This was especially notable in the north-eastern kingdom of Northumbria, which provided England with its first great poet (Caedmon in the 7th Century), its first great historian (the Venerable Bede in the 7th-8th Century) and its first great scholar (Alcuin of York in the 8th Century), although the latter two wrote mainly in Latin. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is usually considered to be “Cædmon’s Hymn” , composed between 658 and 680. Northumbrian culture and language dominated England in the 7th and 8th Centuries, until the coming of the Vikings, after which only Wessex, under Alfred the Great, remained as an independent kingdom. By the 10th Century, the West Saxon dialect had become the dominant, and effectively the official, language of Britain (sometimes referred to as the koiné , or common dialect). The different dialects often had their own preferred spellings as well as distinctive vocabulary (e.g. the word evil was spelled efel in the south-east, and yfel elsewhere; land would be land in West Saxon and Kentish, but lond further north; etc).

The Anglo-Saxon or Old English Language

About 400 Anglo-Saxon texts survive from this era, including many beautiful poems, telling tales of wild battles and heroic journeys. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is “Cædmon’s Hymn” , which was composed between 658 and 680, and the longest was the ongoing “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” . But by far the best known is the long epic poem “Beowulf” .

“Beowulf” may have been written any time between the 8th and the early 11th Century by an unknown author or authors, or, most likely, it was written in the 8th Century and then revised in the 10th or 11th Century. It was probably originally written in Northumbria, although the single manuscript that has come down to us (which dates from around 1000) contains a bewildering mix of Northumbrian, West Saxon and Anglian dialects. The 3,182 lines of the work shows that Old English was already a fully developed poetic language by this time, with a particular emphasis on alliteration and percussive effects. Even at this early stage (before the subsequent waves of lexical enrichment), the variety and depth of English vocabulary, as well as its predilection for synonyms and subtleties of meanings, is evident. For example, the poem uses 36 different words for hero, 20 for man, 12 for battle and 11 for ship. There are also many interesting “kennings” or allusive compound words, such as hronrad (literally, whale-road, meaning the sea), banhus (bone-house, meaning body) and beadoleoma (battle-light, meaning sword). Of the 903 compound nouns in “Beowulf” , 578 are used once only, and 518 of them are known only from this one poem.

Old English was a very complex language, at least in comparison with modern English. Nouns had three genders (male, female and neuter) and could be inflected for up to five cases. There were seven classes of “strong” verbs and three of “weak” verbs, and their endings changed for number, tense, mood and person. Adjectives could have up to eleven forms. Even definite articles had three genders and five case forms as a singular and four as a plural. Word order was much freer than today, the sense being carried by the inflections (and only later by the use of propositions). Although it looked quite different from modern English on paper, once the pronunciation and spelling rules are understood, many of its words become quite familiar to modern ears.

Many of the most basic and common words in use in English today have their roots in Old English, including words like water , earth , house , food , drink , sleep , sing , night , strong , the , a , be , of , he , she , you , no , not , etc. Interestingly, many of our common swear words are also of Anglo-Saxon origin (including tits , fart , shit , turd , arse and, probably, piss ), and most of the others were of early medieval provenance. Care should be taken, though, with what are sometimes called “false friends”, words that appear to be similar in Old English and modern English, but whose meanings have changed, words such as wif (wife, which originally meant any woman, married or not), fugol (fowl, which meant any bird, not just a farmyard one), sona (soon, which meant immediately, not just in a while), won (wan, which meant dark, not pale) and fæst (fast, which meant fixed or firm, not rapidly).

During the 6th Century, for reasons which are still unclear, the Anglo-Saxon consonant cluster “sk” changed to “sh”, so that skield became shield . This change affected all “sk” words in the language at that time, whether recent borrowings from Latin (e.g. disk became dish ) or ancient aboriginal borrowings (e.g. skip became ship ). Any modern English words which make use of the “sk” cluster came into the language after the 6th Century (i.e. after the sound change had ceased to operate), mainly, as we will see below, from Scandinavia.

Then, around the 7th Century, a vowel shift took place in Old English pronunciation (analogous to the Great Vowel Shift during the Early Modern period) in which vowels began to be pronouced more to the front of the mouth. The main sound affected was “i”, hence its common description as “i-mutation” or “i- umlaut ” ( umlaut is a German term meaning sound alteration). As part of this process, the plurals of several nouns also started to be represented by changed vowel pronunciations rather than changes in inflection. These changes were sometimes, but not always, reflected in revised spellings, resulting in inconsistent modern words pairings such as foot / feet , goose / geese , man / men , mouse / mice , as well as blood / bleed , foul / filth , broad / breadth , long / length , old / elder , whole / hale / heal / health , etc.

Beginning of the Prologue of “Beowulf” (36 sec) (from University of Virginia ).

It is estimated that about 85% of the 30,000 or so Anglo-Saxon words gradually died out under the cultural onslaught of the Vikings and the Normans who would come after them, leaving a total of only around 4,500. This represents less than 1% of modern English vocabulary, but it includes some of the most fundamental and important words (e.g. man , wife , child , son , daughter , brother , friend , live , fight , make , use , love , like , look , drink , food , eat , sleep , sing , sun , moon , earth , ground , wood , field , house , home , people , family , horse , fish , farm , water , time , eyes , ears , mouth , nose , strong , work , come , go , be , find , see , look , laughter , night , day , sun , first , many , one , two , other , some , what , when , which , where , word , etc), as well as the most important “function” words (e.g. to , for , but , and , at , in , on , from , etc). Because of this, up to a half of everyday modern English will typically be made up of Old English words, and, by some estimates, ALL of the hundred most commonly-used words in modern English are of Anglo-Saxon origin (although pronunciations and spellings may have changed significantly over time).

The Vikings

By the late 8th Century, the Vikings (or Norsemen) began to make sporadic raids on the east cost of Britain. They came from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, although it was the Danes who came with the greatest force. Notorious for their ferocity, ruthlessness and callousness, the Vikings pillaged and plundered the towns and monasteries of northern England – in 793, they sacked and looted the wealthy monastery at Lindisfarne in Northumbria – before turning their attentions further south. By about 850, the raiders had started to over-winter in southern England and, in 865, there followed a full-scale invasion and on-going battles for the possession of the country.

Viking expansion was finally checked by Alfred the Great and, in 878, a treaty between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings established the Danelaw, splitting the country along a line roughly from London to Chester, giving the Norsemen control over the north and east and the Anglo-Saxons the south and west. Although the Danelaw lasted less than a century, its influence can be seen today in the number of place names of Norse origin in northern England (over 1,500), including many place names ending in “-by”, “-gate”, “-stoke”, “-kirk”, “-thorpe”, “-thwaite”, “-toft” and other suffixes (e.g. Whitby , Grimsby , Ormskirk , Scunthorpe , Stoke Newington , Huthwaite , Lowestoft , etc), as well as the “-son” ending on family names (e.g. Johnson , Harrison , Gibson , Stevenson , etc) as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon equivalent “-ing” (e.g. Manning , Harding , etc).

The Vikings spoke Old Norse, an early North Germanic language not that dissimilar to Anglo-Saxon and roughly similar to modern Icelandic (the word viking actually means “a pirate raid” in Old Norse). Accents and pronunciations in northern England even today are heavily influenced by Old Norse, to the extent that they are largely intelligible in Iceland.

Over time, Old Norse was gradually merged into the English language, and many Scandinavian terms were introduced. In actual fact, only around 150 Norse words appear in Old English manuscripts of the period, but many more became assimilated into the language and gradually began to appear in texts over the next few centuries. In all, up to 1,000 Norse words were permanently added to the English lexicon, among them, some of the most common and fundamental in the language, including skull , skin , leg , neck , freckle , sister , husband , fellow , wing , bull , score , seat , root , bloom , bag , gap , knife , dirt , kid , link , gate , sky , egg , cake , skirt , band , bank , birth , scrap , skill , thrift , window , gasp , gap , law , anger , trust , silver , clasp , call , crawl , dazzle , scream , screech , race , lift , get , give , are , take , mistake , rid , seem , want , thrust , hit , guess , kick , kill , rake , raise , smile , hug , call , cast , clip , die , flat , meek , rotten , tight , odd , rugged , ugly , ill , sly , wrong , loose , happy , awkward , weak , worse , low , both , same , together , again , until , etc.

Old Norse often provided direct alternatives or synonyms for Anglo-Saxon words, both of which have been carried on (e.g. Anglo-Saxon craft and Norse skill , wish and want , dike and ditch , sick and ill , whole and hale , raise and rear , wrath and anger , hide and skin , etc). Unusually for language development, English also adopted some Norse grammatical forms, such as the pronouns they , them and their , although these words did not enter the dialects of London and southern England until as late as the 15th Century. Under the influence of the Danes, Anglo-Saxon word endings and inflections started to fall away during the time of the Danelaw, and prepositions like to , with , by , etc became more important to make meanings clear, although many inflections continued into Middle English, particularly in the south and west (the areas furthest from Viking influence).

Old English after the Vikings

By the time Alfred the Great came to the throne in 871, most of the great monasteries of Northumbria and Mercia lay in ruins and only Wessex remained as an independent kingdom. But Alfred, from his capital town of Winchester, set about rebuilding and fostering the revival of learning, law and religion. Crucially, he believed in educating the people in the vernacular English language, not Latin, and he himself made several translations of important works into English, include Bede’s “Ecclesiastical History of the English People” . He also began the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” , which recounted the history of England from the time of Caesar’s invasion, and which continued until 1154.

He is revered by many as having single-handedly saved English from the destruction of the Vikings, and by the time of his death in 899 he had raised the prestige and scope of English to a level higher than that of any other vernacular language in Europe. The West Saxon dialect of Wessex became the standard English of the day (although the other dialects continued nontheless), and for this reason the great bulk of the surviving documents from the Anglo-Saxon period are written in the dialect of Wessex.

The following paragraph from Aelfrich’s 10th Century “Homily on St. Gregory the Great” gives an idea of what Old English of the time looked like (even if not how it sounded):

Eft he axode, hu ðære ðeode nama wære þ e hi of comon. Him wæs geandwyrd, þ æt hi Angle genemnode wæron. þ a cwæð he, “Rihtlice hi sind Angle gehatene, for ðan ðe hi engla wlite habbað, and swilcum gedafenað þ æt hi on heofonum engla geferan beon.”

A few words stand out immediately as being identical to their modern equivalents ( he , of , him , for , and , on ) and a few more may be reasonably easily guessed ( nama became the modern name , comon became come , wære became were , wæs became was ). But several more have survived in altered form, including axode (asked), hu (how), rihtlice (rightly), engla (angels), habbað (have), swilcum (such), heofonum (heaven), and beon (be), and many more have disappeared completely from the language, including eft (again), ðeode (people, nation), cwæð (said, spoke), gehatene (called, named), wlite (appearance, beauty) and geferan (companions), as have special characters like þ (“thorn”) and ð (“edh” or “eth”) which served in Old English to represent the sounds now spelled with “th”.

Birhtwold’s Speech from “The Battle of Maldon” (29 sec) (from Norton Anthology of English Literature ).

Among the literary works representative of this later period of Old English may be listed the “Battle of Maldon” , an Old English poem relating the events of the Battle of Maldon of 991 (the poem is thought to have been written not long after) and the “Old English Hexateuch” , a richly illustrated Old English translation of the first six books of the Bible, probably compiled in Canterbury in the second quarter of the 11th Century. Ælfric of Eynsham, who wrote in the late 10th and early 11th Century and is best known for his “Colloquy” , was the greatest and most prolific writer of Anglo-Saxon sermons, many of which were copied and adapted for use well into the 13th Century. A number of other Christian, heroic and elegiac poems, secular and Christian prose, as well as riddles, short verses, gnomes and mnemonic poems for remembering long lists of names, have also come down to us more or less intact.

Richard is an English teacher with over 25 years of experience. He has dedicated his life and career to his passion for English, literature, and pedagogy, guiding multiple generations of students on their journey to discovery.

Old English and Anglo Saxon

The Origins of Modern English

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Old English was the  language spoken in England from roughly 500 to 1100 CE. It is one of the Germanic languages derived from a prehistoric Common Germanic originally spoken in southern Scandinavia and the northernmost parts of Germany. Old English is also known as Anglo-Saxon, which is derived from the names of two Germanic tribes that invaded England during the fifth century. The most famous work of Old English literature is the epic poem, " Beowulf ."

Example of Old English

The Lord's Prayer (Our Father) Fæder ure ðu ðe eart on heofenum si ðin nama gehalgod to-becume ðin rice geweorþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofenum. Urne ge dæghwamlican hlaf syle us to-deag and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgifaþ urum gyltendum ane ne gelæde ðu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfle.

On Old English Vocabulary

"The extent to which the Anglo-Saxons overwhelmed the native Britons is illustrated in their vocabulary ... Old English (the name scholars give to the English of the Anglo-Saxons) contains barely a dozen Celtic words... It is impossible...to write a modern English sentence without using a feast of Anglo-Saxon words. Computer analysis of the language has shown that the 100 most common words in English are all of Anglo-Saxon origin. The basic building blocks of an English sentence— the, is, you and so on—are Anglo-Saxon. Some Old English words like mann, hus and drincan hardly need translation." —From "The Story of English" by Robert McCrum, William Cram, and Robert MacNeill

"It has been estimated that only about 3 percent of Old English vocabulary is taken from non-native sources and it is clear that the strong preference in Old English was to use its native resources in order to create new vocabulary. In this respect, therefore, and as elsewhere, Old English is typically Germanic." —From "An Introduction to Old English" by Richard M. Hogg and Rhona Alcorn

"Although contact with other languages has radically altered the nature of its vocabulary, English today remains a Germanic language at its core. The words that describe family relationships— father, mother, brother, son —are of Old English descent (compare Modern German Vater, Mutter, Bruder, Sohn ), as are the terms for body parts, such as foot, finger, shoulder (German  Fuß, Finger, Schulter ), and numerals, one, two, three, four, five (German eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf ) as well as its grammatical words , such as and, for, I (German  und, für, Ich )." —From "How English Became English" by Simon Horobin 

​On Old English and Old Norse Grammar

"Languages which make extensive use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs and depend upon word order to show other relationships are known as analytic languages. Modern English is an analytic, Old English a synthetic language. In its grammar , Old English resembles modern German. Theoretically, the noun and adjective are inflected for four cases in the singular and four in the plural, although the forms are not always distinctive, and in addition the adjective has separate forms for each of the three genders . The inflection of the verb is less elaborate than that of the Latin verb, but there are distinctive endings for the different persons , numbers , tenses , and moods ." —From "A History of the English Language" by A. C. Baugh

"Even before the arrival of the Normans [in 1066], Old English was changing. In the Danelaw, the Old Norse of the Viking settlers was combining with the Old English of the Anglo-Saxons in new and interesting ways. In the poem, 'The Battle of Maldon,' grammatical confusion in the speech of one of the Viking characters has been interpreted by some commentators as an attempt to represent an Old Norse speaker struggling with Old English. The languages were closely related, and both relied very much on the endings of words—what we call 'inflections'—to signal grammatical information. Often these grammatical inflexions were the main thing that distinguished otherwise similar words in Old English and Old Norse.

"For example, the word 'worm' or 'serpent' used as the object of a sentence would have been orminn in Old Norse, and simply wyrm in Old English. The result was that as the two communities strove to communicate with each other, the inflexions became blurred and eventually disappeared. The grammatical information that they signaled had to be expressed using different resources, and so the nature of the English language began to change. New reliance was put on the order of words and on the meanings of little grammatical words like to, with, in, over , and around ." —From "Beginning Old English" by Carole Hough and John Corbett

On Old English and the Alphabet

"The success of English was all the more surprising in that it was not really a written language, not at first. The Anglo-Saxons used a runic alphabet , the kind of writing J.R.R. Tolkien recreated for 'The Lord of the Rings,' and one more suitable for stone inscriptions than shopping lists. It took the arrival of Christianity to spread literacy and to produce the letters of an alphabet which, with a very few differences, is still in use today." —From "The Story of English" by Philip Gooden

Differences Between Old English and Modern English

"There is no point...in playing down the differences between Old and Modern English, for they are obvious at a glance. The rules for spelling Old English were different from the rules for spelling Modern English, and that accounts for some of the difference. But there are more substantial changes as well. The three vowels that appeared in the inflectional endings of Old English words were reduced to one in Middle English, and then most inflectional endings disappeared entirely. Most case distinctions were lost; so were most of the endings added to verbs, even while the verb system became more complex, adding such features as a future tense , a perfect and a pluperfect . While the number of endings was reduced, the order of elements within clauses and sentences became more fixed, so that (for example) it came to sound archaic and awkward to place an object before the verb, as Old English had frequently done." —From "Introduction to Old English" by Peter S. Baker

Celtic Influence on English

"In linguistic terms, obvious Celtic influence on English was minimal, except for place-and river-names ... Latin influence was much more important, particularly for vocabulary... However, recent work has revived the suggestion that Celtic may have had considerable effect on low-status, spoken varieties of Old English, effects which only became evident in the morphology and syntax of written English after the Old English period... Advocates of this still-controversial approach variously provide some striking evidence of coincidence of forms between Celtic languages and English, a historical framework for contact, parallels from modern creole studies, and—sometimes—the suggestion that Celtic influence has been systematically downplayed because of a lingering Victorian concept of condescending English nationalism." —From "A History of the English Language" by David Denison and Richard Hogg

English Language History Resources

• English Language
• Key Events in the History of the English Language
• Language Contact
• Middle English
• Modern English
• Spoken English
• Written English
• McCrum, Robert; Cram, William; MacNeill, Robert. "The Story of English." Viking. 1986
• Hogg, Richard M.; Alcorn, Rhona. "An Introduction to Old English," Second Edition. Edinburgh University Press. 2012
• Horobin, Simon. "How English Became English." Oxford University Press. 2016
• Baugh, A. C. "A History of the English Language," Third Edition. Routledge. 1978
• Hough, Carole; Corbett, John. "Beginning Old English," Second Edition. Palgrave Macmillan. 2013​
• Gooden, Philip. "The Story of English." Quercus. 2009
• Baker, Peter S. "Introduction to Old English." Wiley-Blackwell. 2003
• Denison, David; Hogg, Richard. "Overview" in "A History of the English Language." Cambridge University Press. 2008.
• Middle English Language Explained
• What Are the Letters of the Alphabet?
• English Language: History, Definition, and Examples
• Word Order in English Sentences
• Inflection Definition and Examples in English Grammar
• What is Vocabulary in Grammar?
• New Englishes: Adapting the Language to Meet New Needs
• Definition and Examples of Language Contact
• What Are Irregular Verbs in English?
• What Words Are False Friends?
• How Derivation is Used in Grammar
• Third-Person Pronouns
• A Linguistic Look at Spanish
• Inflectional Morphology
• Regular Verbs: A Simple Conjugation

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Home » Articles » Old English Writing: A History of the Old English Alphabet

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written by George Julian

Language: English

Reading time: 13 minutes

Published: Jan 12, 2018

Updated: Sep 17, 2021

Old English Writing: A History of the Old English Alphabet

Can you read Old English writing? Here's a sample:

Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard metudæs maecti end his modgidanc uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuaes eci dryctin or astelidæ

Those are the first few lines of Cædmon's Hymn , a 7th-Century poem generally considered to be the oldest surviving work of English literature. Any idea what it means?

Me neither. Let's look at the modern translation:

Now shall we praise the Warden of Heaven-Kingdom the might of the Measurer and his purpose work of the Wulder-Father as he of wonders Eternal Lord the beginning created

Separated by more than a millennium, these two texts are barely recognisable as the “same” language. Only two words appear unchanged: he and his . A few other connections shine faintly through, like hefaen for heaven , fadur for father , and uerc for work , but I can’t glean much else… and even in the modern version, I still have no idea what a “Wulder-father” is.

There's no doubt about it: Old and Modern English might as well be two completely different languages. Cædmon's Hymn is utterly incomprehensible to the modern English reader.

(See here for an audio version of the original hymn.)

“Old English” is a broad topic. For this article I'll focus on the history of Old English writing . How was Old English written? How did it change as we shifted into middle and more modern dialects? Why doesn't “count” rhyme with the first syllable of “country”? And why do we continue to torture ESL students with bizarrities like the sentence “a rough coughing thoughtful ploughman from Scarborough bought tough dough in Slough”?

Below, I'll explore all these questions, and also tell you why you're probably pronouncing the word “ye” wrong.

But first, a short history lesson about Old English:

A Brief History of “Englisc”

English is a Germanic language, meaning its closest living relatives are Dutch, Frisian, and of course German. The Germanic family, however, is just one branch of the wider Indo-European language family. Other Indo-European branches include Slavic, Italic, and Celtic.

English originated in the area now called England (duh), but it wasn’t the first language to get here. Before English came along, most people in the British Isles spoke Celtic languages, a family whose modern descendants include Irish and Welsh.

Throughout the first millennium AD, the Celtic-speakers of Britain were slowly displaced by waves of immigration and invasion from the European mainland. Groups like the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes and Frisians sailed to and settled in Britain, bringing their Germanic languages with them.

For obvious geographical reasons, these invaders mainly came from the southeast. That's why the few Celtic languages that remain in the British Isles today (Cornish, Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic ) are only found in the archipelago’s northern and western extremities. Meanwhile, the various Germanic dialects slowly merged into a new language that its speakers called Englisc .

It was roundabout this time that Cædmon (his name is pronounced roughly like “CAD-mon”) composed his hymn.

Old English Runes – found in Ruins

“Hold on a minute” , I hear someone say. “Apart from the weird “æ”, that hymn is written using modern English letters. I thought the Old English alphabet used cool runic characters, kind of like what the dwarves use in Lord of the Rings?”

You're right. (Where do you think Tolkien got the idea from?)

You’re reading this article in the Latin alphabet, but English wasn't always written like this. Before the current writing system was introduced to Britain by Christian missionaries in the 9th and 10th centuries, English was primarily written with Anglo-Saxon runes .

The Old English Alphabet

The Old English alphabet looked like this:

This alphabet is also sometimes called the futhorc , from the pronunciation of its first six letters.

Some experts think that the futhorc was brought to the British Isles by immigrants from Frisia (the northern Netherlands). Another theory is that they came here from Scandinavia, then were taken to Frisia in the other direction.

What we know for sure is that the first runic inscriptions started showing up in Britain around the 5th century A.D.. The oldest known piece of written English is the Undley Bracteate , a gold medallion with a runic inscription that reads “this she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman.” Another example is the Franks Casket , a whalebone chest from the north of England that’s been dated to the 8th century:

By the 11th century, the futhorc resembled one of the Tolkien novels that it inspired: lots of dead characters. But while most runes fell into disuse, a few survived and were mixed in with the newer writing system.

A “Thorny Problem” with Old English Runes

The following is an extract from the poem The Battle of Maldon , thought to be written shortly after the titular battle of 991 AD:

Brimmanna boda, abeod eft ongean, sege þinum leodum miccle laþre spell, þæt her stynt unforcuð eorl mid his werode, þe wile gealgean eþel þysne

What are those funny “þ” and “ð” characters?

The former, called thorn , is a rune that stayed in use even after most other runes had been forgotten. The latter, called eth , is a modification of the Latin letter d . Both are pronounced like the modern “th” sound(s). So þæt means “that”, þe means “the”, and I have no idea what unforcuð means, but I imagine it was pronounced something like “un-for-kuth”.

(You can read a modern translation of The Battle of Maldon here .)

The rune ƿ (“wynn”) also survived longer than most, used to represent the sound that we now write as “w”. Eventually ƿ was replaced with “uu”, which was then simplified to “w”, which explains why “w” is called “double-u”.

If you speak a modern Latin language like Spanish, you’ll know that they generally don’t use “w”, except in foreign words and names like Washington . This is because “w” didn’t exist in the Latin alphabet; it’s a more recent innovation from English and other northern European languages.

Still, The Battle of Maldon is not much easier to understand than Caedmon’s Hymn .

Thanks to Runes, You're Saying “Ye” Wrong

Runes that have filtered down into “Latin” English can mean that even today we pronounce some English words incorrectly.

There's a trope in the English-speaking world of writing “ye olde [something]” when you want the name of that something to sound old-timey or Medieval. For example, you might see a pub called “Ye Olde Pubbe”.

There are two problems with this. First of all, the world olde is (ironically) a modern invention. “Old” was never written like that in historical English.

Secondly, when modern speakers read the “ye” of “ye olde”, they usually pronounce it like it's written, with a “y” sound. This isn’t how Old English speakers would have said it! If you said “ye” like this to an 11th-Century Englishman, they’d understand it as a plural form of you ; this sense lives on in archaic expressions like “hear ye”.

The misconception stems from the fact that the word “the” was once written as “þe”, using the “thorn” rune. A handwritten “þ” sometimes looked like a “y”. More importantly, Medieval printing presses didn’t have a “þ” character, so they substituted in “y” instead. So when they printed ye , they were actually writing the .

So, the correct way to pronounce “ye olde pubbe” is in fact simply “ the old pub”.

How Old English was Changed Forever by Norman Nobles

Have you noticed how many words English has?

Why do comprehend , respire and azure need to exist when we already have understand , breathe , and blue ?

To answer this question, we must go all the way back to the year 1066. As every Brit learns in school, that was the year when William of Normandy, claiming to be the rightful king of England (it was a family matter) sailed across the English Channel, killed his rival Harold in battle, and installed himself on the throne.

With the Normans in charge of England, their dialect of French became the language of nobility. To this day, the British parliament still uses Norman French for certain official purposes.

Meanwhile, the plebeians and riff-raff continued to speak Englisc . The two languages merged over time, but we’re still living with the consequences: fancy words like comprehend and respire have their roots in Latin (via Norman French), while their more common synonyms like understand and breathe are the “original” English words, Germanic in origin.

(Fun fact: despite the French on their tongues, the Normans were actually Vikings who had settled in France; the name “Norman” comes from “North-man”. For some reason they lost their original language and picked up one of the local dialects instead, but the more interesting point is that the modern British royal family are directly descended from the same Norman nobles who conquered England in 1066. You heard it right: Queen Elizabeth II is a Viking.)

As well as introducing new vocabulary, the Normans also changed the spelling of some words. For example, the Old English hwaer , hwil and hwaenne became where , when and while , even though the “hw-” spelling more accurately reflected the pronunciation.

Some English speakers, particularly in parts of the U.S., still pronounce words like where with an “h” sound at the beginning – listen to how Johnny Cash says the word “white” at about 0:14 in The Man Comes Around . It’s been nearly 1,000 years, and we still haven’t recovered from this weird spelling change.

And as anyone remotely literate in English knows, when it comes to weird spelling, “white” is just the tip of the iceberg.

From Old English to Middle English

Linguists generally mark the Norman Conquest as the dividing line between Old and Middle English. Within a few centuries, English was finally starting to resemble the language we speak today:

A monk ther was, a fair for the maistrye An out-rydere, that lovede venerye; A manly man, to been an abbot able. Ful many a deyntee hors hadde he in stable

That’s from from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, probably the most famous work of pre-Shakespearean English literature, and a well-known example of (Late) Middle English.

And it’s readable! The spelling is weird, and I don't know what venerye or “maistrye” are, but for the most part I can understand Chaucer without having to search Google for a modern translation.

The Canterbury Tales were written at the tail-end of the 14th Century, a time when English spelling varied widely from place to place. Why wouldn’t it? When you rarely communicate with people who live far away, and you pronounce things differently from them anyway, there’s not much incentive for everybody to try and spell things the same way. All that started to change, however, in the late 15th Century, thanks to an important new invention: the printing press.

As it became easier to put English to paper and to disseminate it widely, local variations in spelling were slowly ironed out. But who got to decide which spelling was “correct”? The answer: no-one. Publishers in different parts of the country used spellings that reflected their local pronunciations and biases. Some spellings caught on nationally, others didn’t, and the emerging “standard” system of English spelling picked up words from all over the place and became full of inconsistencies.

These inconsistencies persist to this day, and have only got worse as pronunciation has changed further. You can see this, for example, in the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare rhymed “sword” with “word”, to give just one example – it made sense at the time, but since then the pronunciations have split. Even then, we haven’t bothered to update the spelling, so “sword” and “word” still look like they should rhyme.

(Some troupes now put on productions of Shakespeare using the original Elizabethan pronunciation , a delight for language nerds like myself.)

There was also a fad in some parts for using spellings that reflected not a word’s pronunciation but its etymology. So for example, “debt” gained its silent “b”, reflecting its origins in the Latin debitum .

Similarly, the Middle English word “iland” gained a silent “s” in order to make it closer to the French isle (and the Latin insula ). This was actually a mistake: iland was a Germanic word, and its resemblance to French and Latin is just a coincidence. 500 years later, the misconception remains uncorrected.

Even more unfortunately for modern learners of English, the advent of the printing press happened at a time when English pronunciation was changing rapidly. Modern linguists call it the Great Vowel Shift . Over a period of a few hundred years, the pronunciations of most English vowels changed dramatically, at the exact same time that their spellings were becoming set in stone.

And so in the 21st century, English spelling makes so little sense that even native speakers can struggle.

• Why don’t “stove”, “love” and “move” rhyme with each other?
• Why is “trollies” the plural of “trolley”, but the plural of “monkey” isn’t “monkies”?
• Why is it “i before e, except after c”… and except in science , receive , species , sufficient , vein , feisty , foreign , or ceiling ?

Hell, we don’t even write our language's name in a way that makes sense. Shouldn’t it be “Inglish”?

I wonder what the total economic cost is of all this madness? How much time and energy are wasted on schooling children, reprinting documents with errors, and pedantically correcting people who write “sneak peak” or “wrecking havoc”?

It shouldn't have to be like this. Is there any way out of this mess? We’ll see.

English Writing: A Standard Way of Spelling?

There have been many attempts to reform English spelling, and some have even been successful: when Noah Webster published his dictionaries in the 19th Century, he made several proposals for new spellings. Some, like the idea to drop the “k” from “publick” and “musick”, caught on. Others, like the suggestion to remove the “u” from “colour” and “humour”, only gained traction on one side of the Atlantic. Many of his other proposals didn’t catch on at all , and English remains full of oddities.

Reform isn’t impossible. The German-speaking countries managed to do it in the 1990s, slightly simplifying the spelling of some German words and making the new orthography compulsory in government documents and schools. More recently, the CPLP (Community of Portuguese Language Countries) passed a similar reform, which is still being implemented in Portuguese-speaking countries today.

In the English-speaking world, however, it’s unlikely that we’ll muster the will to change our spelling any time soon. One problem is that we don’t have an official body like the CPLP that has any influence over the language. Another problem is that there are there are just too many English speakers, spread across too many countries, with too many variations in pronunciation. No-one would ever agree on what the “correct” new spellings should be.

But the biggest barrier of all is that most people don’t care. In fact, many native English speakers are proud of the difficulty of English spelling; it’s seen as an intellectual achievement to master it all. And of course, people who have already learned all the current spellings don’t want to go through the bother of learning them all again.

For now, English spelling is one of those things like the QWERTY keyboard, or the fact that different countries drive on different sides of the road. It’s not ideal, and if we could start over we’d probably do things differently, but it’s just not worth the effort to fix. There are more important problems to worry about.

So it seems that for now, we’re stuck with that “rough coughing thoughtful ploughman”. And it’s been a hell of a journey to get here.

George Julian

Content Writer, Fluent in 3 Months

George is a polyglot, linguistics nerd and travel enthusiast from the U.K. He speaks four languages and has dabbled in another five, and has been to more than forty countries. He currently lives in London.

Speaks: English, French, Spanish, German, Vietnamese, Portuguese

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Dictionary of Old English

The vocabulary of the first six centuries (C.E. 600-1150) of the English language,

The Dictionary of Old English

The Dictionary of Old English (DOE) defines the vocabulary of the first six centuries (C.E. 600-1150) of the English language, using twenty-first century technology. The DOE complements the Middle English Dictionary (which covers the period C.E. 1100-1500) and the Oxford English Dictionary , the three together providing a full description of the vocabulary of English.

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• Research Associate Position at DOE February 15, 2024
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• Épinal-Erfurt Glossary A-Q Online March 7, 2023
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Old English Online

Series introduction, jonathan slocum and winfred p. lehmann.

All lessons now include audio!

Recorded by Thomas M. Cable , Professor Emeritus of the University of Texas at Austin.

Old English is the language of the Germanic inhabitants of England, dated from the time of their settlement in the 5th century to the end of the 11th century. It is also referred to as Anglo-Saxon, a name given in contrast with the Old Saxon of the inhabitants of northern Germany; these are two of the dialects of West Germanic, along with Old Frisian, Old Franconian, and Old High German. Sister families to West Germanic are North Germanic, with Old Norse (a.k.a. Old Icelandic) as its chief dialect, and East Germanic, with Gothic as its chief (and only attested) dialect. The Germanic parent language of these three families, referred to as Proto-Germanic, is not attested but may be reconstructed from evidence within the families, such as provided by Old English texts.

Old English itself has three dialects: West Saxon, Kentish, and Anglian. West Saxon was the language of Alfred the Great (871-901) and therefore achieved the greatest prominence; accordingly, the chief Old English texts have survived in this dialect. In the course of time, Old English underwent various changes such as the loss of final syllables, which also led to simplification of the morphology. Upon the conquest of England by the Normans in 1066, numerous words came to be adopted from French and, subsequently, also from Latin.

For a reconstruction of the parent language of Old English, called Proto-Germanic, see Winfred Lehmann's book on this subject. For access to our online version of Bosworth and Toller's dictionary of Old English, see An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary .

Note: this page is for systems/browsers with Unicode ® support and fonts spanning the Unicode 3 character set relevant to Old English. Versions of this page rendered in alternate character sets are available via links ( Romanized and Unicode 2 ) in the left margin, and at the bottom of this page.

Alphabet and Pronunciation

The alphabet used to write our Old English texts was adopted from Latin, which was introduced by Christian missionaries. Unfortunately, for the beginning student, spelling was never fully standardized: instead the alphabet, with continental values (sounds), was used by scribal monks to spell words "phonetically" with the result that each dialect, with its different sounds, was rendered differently -- and inconsistently, over time, due to dialectal evolution and/or scribal differences. King Alfred did attempt to regularize spelling in the 9th century, but by the 11th century continued changes in pronunciation once again exerted their disruptive effects on spelling. In modern transcriptions such as ours, editors often add diacritics to signal vowel pronunciation, though seldom more than macrons (long marks).

Anglo-Saxon scribes added two consonants to the Latin alphabet to render the th sounds: first the runic thorn ( þ ), and later eth ( ð ). However, there was never a consistent distinction between them as their modern IPA equivalents might suggest: different instances of the same word might use þ in one place and ð in another. We follow the practices of our sources in our textual transcriptions, but our dictionary forms tend to standardize on either þ or ð -- mostly the latter, though it depends on the word. To help reduce confusion, we sort these letters indistinguishably, after T; the reader should not infer any particular difference. Another added letter was the ligature ash ( æ ), used to represent the broad vowel sound now rendered by 'a' in, e.g., the word fast . A letter wynn was also added, to represent the English w sound, but it looks so much like thorn that modern transcriptions replace it with the more familiar 'w' to eliminate confusion.

The nature of non-standardized Anglo-Saxon spelling does offer compensation: no letters were "silent" (i.e., all were pronounced), and phonetic spelling helps identify and track dialectal differences through time. While the latter is not always relevant to the beginning student, it is nevertheless important to philologists and others interested in dialects and the evolution of the early English language.

At first glance, Old English texts may look decidedly strange to a modern English speaker: many Old English words are no longer used in modern English, and the inflectional structure was far more rich than is true of its modern descendant. However, with small spelling differences and sometimes minor meaning changes, many of the most common words in Old and modern English are the same. For example, over 50 percent of the thousand most common words in Old English survive today -- and more than 75 percent of the top hundred. Conversely, more than 80 percent of the thousand most common words in modern English come from Old English. A few "teaser" examples appear below; our Master Glossary or Base-Form Dictionary may be scanned for examples drawn from our texts, and any modern English dictionary that includes etymologies will provide hundreds or thousands more.

• Nouns: cynn 'kin', hand , god , man(n) , word .
• Pronouns: hē , ic 'I', mē , self , wē .
• Verbs: beran 'bear', cuman 'come', dyde 'did', sittan 'sit', wæs 'was'.
• Adjectives: fæst 'fast', gōd 'good', hālig 'holy', rīce 'rich', wīd 'wide'.
• Adverbs: ær 'ere', alle 'all', nū 'now', tō 'too', ðǣr 'there'.
• Prepositions: æfter 'after', for , in , on , under .
• Articles: ðæt 'that', ðis 'this'.
• Conjunctions: and , gif 'if'.

Sentence Structure

In theory, Old English was a "synthetic" language, meaning inflectional endings signalled grammatical structure and word order was rather free, as for example in Latin; modern English, by contrast, is an "analytic" language, meaning word order is much more constrained (e.g., with clauses typically in Subject-Verb-Object order). But in practice, actual word order in Old English prose is not too often very different from that of modern English, with the chief differences being the positions of verbs (which might be moved, e.g., to the end of a clause for emphasis) and occasionally prepositions (which might become "postpositions"). In Old English verse, most bets are off: word order becomes much more free, and word inflections & meaning become even more important for deducing syntax. The same may be said, however, of modern English poetry, but in these lessons we tend to translate Old English poetry as prose. Altogether, once a modern English reader has mastered the common vocabulary and inflectional endings of Old English, the barriers to text comprehension are substantially reduced.

As we will see, Old English words were much inflected. Over time, most of this apparatus was lost and English became the analytic language we recognize today, but to read early English texts one must master the conjugations of verbs and the declensions of nouns, etc. Yet these inflectional systems had already been reduced by the time Old English was first being written, long after it had parted ways with its Proto-Germanic ancestor. The observation that matters "could have been worse" should serve as consolation to any modern English student who views conjugation and declension with trepidation.

Nouns, adjectives, and pronouns

These categories of Old English words are declined according to case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, or sometimes instrumental), number (singular, plural, or [for pronouns] dual meaning 'two'), and gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter: inherent in nouns, but inherited by adjectives and pronouns from the nouns they associate with). In addition, some adjectives are inflected to distinguish comparative and superlative uses.

Adjectives and regular nouns are either "strong" or "weak" in declension. In addition, irregular nouns belong to classes that reflect their earlier Germanic or even Indo-European roots; these classes, or more to the point their progenitors, will not be stressed in our lessons, but descriptions are found in the handbooks.

Pronouns are typically suppletive in their declension, meaning inflectional rules do not account for many forms so each form must be memorized (as is true of modern English I/me , you , he/she/it/his/her , etc). Tables will be provided. Similarly, a few nouns and adjectives are "indeclinable" and, again, some or all forms must be memorized.

Old English verbs are conjugated according to person (1st, 2nd, or 3rd), number (singular or plural), tense (present or past/preterite), mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive or perhaps optative), etc.

Most verbs are either "strong" or "weak" in conjugation; there are seven classes of strong verbs and three classes of weak verbs. A few other verbs, including modals (e.g. for 'can', 'must'), belong to a special category called "preterit-present," where different rules apply, and yet others (e.g. for 'be', 'do', 'go') are "anomalous," meaning each form must be memorized (as is true of modern English am/are/is , do/did , go/went , etc).

Other parts of speech

The numerals may be declined, albeit with fewer distinct forms than is normal for adjectives, and those for 'two' and 'three' may show gender. Other parts of speech are not inflected, except for some adverbs with comparative and superlative forms.

Lesson Recordings

This lesson series features audio recitations of each lesson text, accessible by clicking on the speaker icon (🔊) beside corresponding text sections.  Prof. Thomas Cable, Emeritus, dedicated countless hours to the preparation and recording of these texts.  The Linguistics Research Center is immensely grateful for Prof. Cable's generosity, patience, and good humor throughout the entire process.

Related Language Courses at UT

Most but not all language courses taught at The University of Texas concern modern languages; however, courses in Old and Middle English, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, are taught in the Department of English (link opens in a new browser window). Other online language courses for college credit are offered through the University Extension (new window).

West Germanic Resources Elsewhere

Our Links page includes pointers to West Germanic resources elsewhere.

The Old English Lessons

• Beowulf: Prologue
• Bede's Account of the Poet Caedmon
• Cynewulf and Cyneheard
• Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan
• Alfred's Wars with the Danes
• The Battle of Maldon
• Genesis A: the Flood
• The Wanderer
• The Seafarer
• Beowulf: the Funeral
• Show full Table of Contents with Grammar Points index
• Open a Master Glossary window for these English texts
• Open a Base Form Dictionary window for these English texts
• Open an English Meaning Index window for these English texts

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Old English – an overview

Historical background, some distinguishing features of old english.

• The beginning of Old English

The end of Old English

Old english dialects, old english verbs, derivational relationships and sound changes.

Old English is the name given to the earliest recorded stage of the English language, up to approximately 1150AD (when the Middle English period is generally taken to have begun). It refers to the language as it was used in the long period of time from the coming of Germanic invaders and settlers to Britain—in the period following the collapse of Roman Britain in the early fifth century—up to the Norman Conquest of 1066, and beyond into the first century of Norman rule in England. It is thus first and foremost the language of the people normally referred to by historians as the Anglo-Saxons.

‘Anglo-Saxon’ was one of a number of alternative names formerly used for this period in the language’s history. On the history of the terms see  Old English  n. and adj.,  Anglo-Saxon  n. and adj.,  E n glish  adj. (and adv.) and n., and also  Middle English  n. and adj.

Before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, the majority of the population of Britain spoke Celtic languages. In Roman Britain, Latin had been in extensive use as the language of government and the military and probably also in other functions, especially in urban areas and among the upper echelons of society. However, it is uncertain how much Latin remained in use in the post-Roman period.

During the course of the next several hundred years, gradually more and more of the territory in the area, later to be known as England, came under Anglo-Saxon control. (On the history of the name, see  England  n.).

Precisely what fate befell the majority of the (Romano-)British population in these areas is a matter of much debate. Certainly very few words were borrowed into English from Celtic (it is uncertain whether there may have been more influence in some areas of grammar and pronunciation), and practically all of the Latin borrowings found in Old English could be explained as having been borrowed either on the continent (i.e. beforehand) or during or after the conversion to Christianity (i.e. later).

The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, which began in the late sixth century and was largely complete by the late seventh century, was an event of huge cultural importance. One of its many areas of impact was the introduction of writing extensive texts in the Roman alphabet on parchment (as opposed to inscribing very short inscriptions on wood, bone, or stone in runic characters). Nearly all of our surviving documentary evidence for Old English is mediated through the Church, and the impress of the literary culture of Latin Christianity is deep on nearly everything that survives written in Old English.

Conflict and interaction with raiders and settlers of Scandinavian origin is a central theme in Anglo-Saxon history essentially from the time of the first recorded raids in the late eighth century onwards. However, the linguistic impact of this contact is mainly evident only in the Middle English period. Likewise, the cataclysmic political events of the Norman Conquest took some time to show their full impact on the English language.

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In grammar, Old English is chiefly distinguished from later stages in the history of English by greater use of a larger set of inflections in verbs, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns, and also (connected with this) by a rather less fixed word order; it also preserves grammatical gender in nouns and adjectives.

An example : The following couple of lines from Ælfric’s De temporibus anni: ‘Ðunor cymð of hætan & of wætan. Seo lyft tyhð þone wætan to hire neoðan & ða hætan ufan.’

may be translated word-for-word as:

Thunder comes from heat and from moisture. The air draws the moisture to it from below and the heat from above.

To pick out a very few grammatical features:

The nouns  hæte , ‘heat’, and  wæta , ‘moisture’, both have the inflection – an  in the first sentence, because both are in the dative case, governed by the preposition  of  ‘from’.

In the second sentence they both again have the inflection – an , but this time they are in the accusative case, as the direct objects of  tyhð  ‘draws’.

The forms of the definite article agree with these nouns, but you will note that they are different in each instance,  þone wætan  ‘the moisture’ (direct object), but  ða hætan  ‘the heat’ (also direct object). The difference arises because  wæta  ‘moisture’ is masculine but  hæte  ‘heat’ is feminine, and the article (like other adjectives) agrees in gender as well as case.

For another example of gender agreement, look at the pronoun  hire  (i.e. the antecedent of modern English  her ) referring to  seo lyft  (feminine) ‘the air’.

In vocabulary, Old English is much more homogeneous than later stages in the history of English. Some borrowings from Latin date back to before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons to Britain (i.e. they were borrowed on the continent), while many others date from the period of the conversion to Christianity and later. However, words borrowed from Latin or from other languages make up only a tiny percentage of the vocabulary of Old English, and the major influx of words from French and from Latin belongs to the Middle English period and later. (There are also numerous loan translations and semantic loans from Latin in Old English, reflecting the influence of Latin on the language of religion and learning.)

Some Old English words of Latin origin that have survived into modern English include belt , butter , chalk , chest , cup , fan , fork , mile ,  minster , mint , monk ,  pepper , school ,  sock , strop , wine .

Some borrowing from early Scandinavian is attested in later Old English, but again the major impact of contact with Scandinavian settlers becomes evident only in Middle English.

There is also a great deal of continuity between Old English and later stages in the history of the language. A great deal of the core vocabulary of modern English goes back to Old English, including most of the words most frequently used today.

For a very few examples see I pron. and n.², one adj., n., and pron., and conj.¹, adv., and n., man n. 1 (and int.), woman n.

For further information on which Old English words are included in the  OED , and on how Old English material is dated in the dictionary, see  Old English in the  OED  by Anthony Esposito.

Some letters from the Old English alphabet which modern English has lost:

• þ, ð both represent the same sounds as modern th, as e.g. in  thin  or  then ;
• æ and a represent distinct sounds in Old English, formed with the tongue respectively at the front and back of the mouth.

The pronunciation of e.g.  trap  or  man  in many modern varieties of English comes close to Old English æ, whereas Old English a was more like the sound in modern German  Mann  ‘man’ or Spanish  mano  ‘hand’ (like the sound in modern English  father , but shorter).

The beginning of Old English…

It is very difficult to say when Old English began, because this pushes us back beyond the date of our earliest records for either Old English or any of its closest relatives (with the exception of very occasional inscriptions and the evidence of words and names occurring in Latin or in other languages). Everyone agrees in calling the language of our earliest extensive sources found in contemporary copies ‘Old English’: these are Latin-English glossaries from around the year 700. (Some other material was certainly composed before 700, but survives only in later copies.) By this time Old English was already very distinct from its Germanic sister languages (see below) as a result of many sound changes (i.e. changes in how certain sounds were pronounced, chiefly when they occurred near to certain other sounds) and other linguistic developments. In fact, most of the most important changes which we can trace through our surviving Old English documents had already happened before this time. Some of them were very probably well in progress or even complete before the time of the settlement in England.

Some Latin-English glosses from one of our earliest sources (the Épinal Glossary):

• anser  goos  (i.e. ‘goose’)
• lepus, leporis  hara  (i.e. ‘hare’)
• nimbus  storm  (i.e. ‘storm’)
• olor  suan  (i.e. ‘swan’)

Some scholars distinguish the undocumented period before our earliest texts as ‘pre-Old English’, while others are happy just to use the name ‘Old English’ for this period as well as for the documented period. In practice, the dividing line is hazy. Most of our documentary evidence for Old English comes from much later (late ninth century and onwards), and even in the later period there is much that we do not know. In the earlier part of the documented period, the gaps and uncertainties mean that we often know just as little about a certain topic as we do for the preceding undocumented period.

If we trace its history back further, Old English belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Germanic languages, along with Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High German, and the various dialects which later gave rise to Old Dutch. The major early representatives of the North Germanic branch are Old Icelandic, Old Norwegian, Old Swedish, and Old Danish (although the earliest extensive remains for all of these are much later than the earliest Old English documents), while the only representative of the East Germanic branch for which extensive remains survive is Gothic. Ultimately, all of these branches diverged from a single hypothetical ancestor, (proto-)Germanic, which itself constitutes a branch of the larger Indo-European language family. Other branches of Indo-European include Celtic, Italic (including Latin and hence the Romance languages), Greek, Indo-Iranian (including Sanskrit and Persian), Baltic, and Slavonic (these last two being regarded by many as a single branch, Balto-Slavonic).

In fact, very many details of the pre-historic relationships between Old English and the other Germanic languages are much debated and very controversial, which greatly complicates any attempt to say when ‘Old English’ began.

The conventional dividing date of approximately 1150 between Old English and Middle English reflects (very roughly) the period when these changes in grammar and vocabulary begin to become noticeable in most of the surviving texts (which are not very numerous from this transitional period). In what is often called ‘transitional English’ the number of distinct inflections becomes fewer, and word order takes on an increasing functional load. At the same time borrowings from French and (especially in northern and eastern texts) from early Scandinavian become more frequent. All of these processes were extremely gradual, and did not happen at the same rate in all places. Therefore any dividing date is very arbitrary, and can only reflect these developments very approximately.

The surviving Old English documents are traditionally attributed to four different major dialects: Kentish (in the south-east), West Saxon (in the south-west), Mercian (in the midland territories of Mercia), and Northumbrian (in the north); because of various similarities they show, Mercian and Northumbrian are often grouped together as Anglian. This division is largely based on linguistic differences shown by various of the major early sources, although many of the details are highly controversial, and some scholars are very critical of the traditional association of these linguistic differences (however approximately) with the boundaries of various politically defined areas (which are themselves only poorly understood), and today many of the details of where each variety was centred geographically are subject to debate. For political and cultural reasons, manuscripts written in the West Saxon dialect hugely predominate among our later records (although much of the verse is something of a special case), reflecting the widespread adoption of a form of West Saxon as a written language in the later Old English period.

There are only a few named figures in the history of writings in Old English. In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography you can read about: Ælfric of Eynsham , Wulfstan [Lupus] , Alfred  [Ælfred], Cædmon , and Cynewulf .

Verbs in Old English show an extensive range of inflections, reflecting distinctions of person and number (e.g. first person singular, first person plural, etc.), tense (present or past), and mood (indicative, subjunctive, or imperative); many other distinctions are realized by periphrastic constructions with  be  v.,  worth  v.,  will  v., or  shall  v. as auxiliary in combination with non-finite forms of the verb.

With the exception of some (mostly high frequency) irregular or anomalous verbs, Old English verbs belong to one of two main groupings: strong verbs and weak verbs.

The strong verbs realize differences of tense by variation in the stem vowel. They are assigned to seven main classes, according to the vowel variation shown. Thus RIDE v., a Class I strong verb, shows the following vowel gradation in its “principal parts”, from which all of its other inflections can be inferred:

• infinitive:  rīdan
• past tense singular:  rād
• past tense plural:  ridon
• past participle:  (ge)riden

Similarly, the Class III strong verb BIND v. shows the following principal parts:

• infinitive:  bindan
• past tense singular:  band ( or  bond)
• past tense plural:  bundon
• past participle:  (ge)bunden

The principal parts of the various classes can simply be memorized as fairly arbitrary sets (with various subclasses and exceptions). To understand the causes of this variation we need to go back to a much earlier system of vowel gradation called ablaut, which Germanic inherited from Indo-European, and which Germanic made extensive use of in the strong verb system.

Since ablaut also ultimately explains the relationships between many other Old English words, it can be very useful to have some understanding of how it works, although it is far from simple. See the section below for a very short sketch.

A very short introduction to ablaut   The stem vowels  ī, ā, i, i  shown by  rīdan  ultimately reflect Indo-European * ei, *oi, *i, *i  (giving by regular development Germanic  *ī, *ai, *i, *i , giving ultimately Old English  ī, ā, i, i ). Thus, the principal parts in Old English can be explained as reflecting Indo-European * i  in combination with either * e  (hence * ei ), * o  (hence * oi ), or nothing (hence * i ). For these reasons, the infinitive  rīdan  is said to show the Indo-European  e -grade, the past tense singular  rād  is said to show the Indo-European  o -grade, and the past tense plural  ridon  and past participle  (ge)riden  are said to show the Indo-European  zero -grade, even though, confusingly, the Old English forms themselves do not show  e ,  o , or  zero . Similarly,  bindan  ultimately reflects a sequence * en, *on, *n, *n , in which * e, *o , or nothing appear in combination with * n . Similar variation figures largely in a great many etymologies: for some examples see e.g. love   n .¹, owe  v ., raw  adj . and  n .¹, cool  adj .,  adv ., and  int ., red   adj .,  n ., (and adv.), rift   n 1 .

The weak verbs form the past tense and past participle in a quite different way, using a suffix with a vowel followed by  -d -, which is the ancestor of the modern inflection in  -ed  (see ‘ – ed ’   suffix¹ ). Thus  lufian  LOVE v.¹ (a weak Class II verb) shows 1st and 3rd person past singular  lufode .

Weak verbs often originated as derivative formations, and often preserve some aspect of this in their meaning, as for example showing causative or inchoative meaning: see below on  cēlan  ‘to (cause to) cool’ and  cōlian  ‘to become cool’.

Many Old English words belong to large groups of words all derived ultimately from the same base, and are related to one another in ways that would have been fairly transparent to speakers of the language. However, in the period of our literary documents the relationships between words were often much less clear than they are likely to have been earlier, because sound changes and other developments had obscured the derivational relationships.

For example,  cōl  ‘cool’ (see  cool   adj .,  adv ., and  int .) has a small family of related words in Old English, including  cōlnes   coolness   n ., which clearly shows the same base plus ‘-NESS ’   suffix . The relationship is similarly clear in the case of the derivative Class II weak verb  cōlian  ‘to become cool’ (see  cool  v .¹).

However, the relationship is less immediately clear in the case of the derivative Class I weak verb  cēlan  ‘to (cause to) cool’ (see keel   v .¹). In this case the difference in the stem vowel was caused by an important process called  i -mutation which occurred before the date of our earliest records. The earlier form was probably * kōljan . In the process called  i -mutation an  i  or  j  caused a change in the vowel in the preceding syllable, in this case  *ō > *ē . In this word (as in many others) the  j  was then itself lost, so that by the time of our surviving texts we find  cēlan  in the same word family as  cōl ,  cōlnes , and  cōlian .

The same process explains the variation that we find in the stem vowel in the plural of some words. The word  mouse  of course shows in modern English the plural form  mice ; similarly in Old English we find singular  mūs  but plural  mȳs . The earlier forms would have been singular * mūs , plural * mūsi  (earlier * mūsiz );  i -mutation caused the change  *ū  >  *ȳ  in the plural, and then the  i  was in turn lost, so that in our surviving texts we find singular  mūs  but plural  mȳs .

This and similar processes explain many of the rather complex relationships between related word forms in Old English.

Further reading on Old English

• Richard Hogg and Rhona Alcorn,  An Introduction to Old English  (2nd edn., 2012)
• Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson,  A Guide to Old English  (8th edn., 2011)
• Roger Lass,  Old English: A Historical Linguistic Companion  (1994)
• Richard Hogg ed.,  The Cambridge History of the English Language vol. i: The Beginnings to 1066  (1992)
• Philip Durkin,  The Oxford Guide to Etymology  (2009)

About the  OED

• More about the  OED
• More about the history of English
• What’s new? Recent updates

Author: Philip Durkin, OED Deputy Chief Editor

Old English in the OED

Old English is the term used to refer to the oldest recorded stage of the English language, i.e. from the earliest evidence in the seventh century to the period of transition with Middle English in the mid-twelfth century.

Middle English – an overview

Middle English is framed at its beginning by the after-effects of the Norman Conquest, and at its end by the arrival in Britain of printing, the important impacts of the English Reformation, and the ideas of the continental Renaissance.

Dating Middle English evidence in the OED

These notes explain some of the principles and procedures involved in the dating of Middle English sources in the OED.

Early Modern English – an overview

The early modern English period follows the Middle English period towards the end of the fifteenth century and coincides closely with the Tudor (1485–1603) and Stuart (1603-1714) dynasties.

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From old English to modern English

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Find out more about The Open University’s Language Studies qualification.

How and why has English changed over time?

In this brief introduction to the subject, I will show how we can look at the history of a language in two main ways: externally – where, why and by whom the language was used; the political and social factors causing change – and internally – the pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and written appearance of the language; the motivations for change arising from the structure of the language itself.

I will structure my discussion around the conventional division of the history of English into three main periods: Old, Middle and Modern English.

The Old English (OE) period can be regarded as starting around AD 450, with the arrival of West Germanic settlers (Angles, Saxons and Jutes) in southern Britain. They brought with them dialects closely related to the continental language varieties which would produce modern German, Dutch and Frisian.

This Germanic basis for English can be seen in much of our everyday vocabulary – compare heart (OE heorte ), come (OE cuman ) and old (OE eald ) with German Herz , kommen and alt .

Many grammatical features also date back to this time: irregular verbs such as drink ~ drank ~ drunk (OE drincan ~ dranc ~ (ge)druncen ) parallel German trinken ~ trank ~ getrunken . Similarly, many OE pronunciations are preserved in modern spellings e.g. knight (OE cniht , German Knecht ), in which k would have been pronounced and gh sounded like ch in Scots loch .

OE, also called Anglo-Saxon, was not heavily influenced by the Celtic languages spoken by the native inhabitants of the British Isles, borrowing only a few words (e.g. brock , tor ) associated with local wildlife and geography (but many place and river names e.g. Dover , Avon ). However, Latin, introduced to Britain by the Romans, and reinforced in its influence by the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity during the 7 th century, had a significant impact, providing both vocabulary (e.g. master , mass , school ) and the basis for the writing system.

OE was mostly written using the Latin alphabet, supplemented by a few Germanic runic letters to represent sounds not found in Latin e.g. þ , which represented the th sounds in thin or this . (A relic of þ survives as y in modern signs like Ye Olde Tea Shoppe .)

British Isles also resulted in substantial borrowing of basic vocabulary: sky , get and they derive from Old Norse.

An example of Old English text can be seen in the Start of Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf (manuscript c.1000 AD)

Norse influence may also have contributed to an important grammatical change, which mainly occurred in English between the 11 th and 14 th centuries, and which marked the transition to Middle English (ME) (conventionally dated c.1100-1500). OE had indicated many grammatical categories and relationships by attaching inflections (endings) to word roots, in a similar way to Latin or German.

Thus, in the OE clause wolde guman findan ‘he wanted to find the man’, the – e on wolde indicates a 3 rd person singular subject: ‘ he wanted’; the – n on guman indicates that ‘the man’ is the object, not the subject of the verb; and the – an on findan indicates an infinitive: ‘ to find’.

In ME, changes in the pronunciation of unstressed syllables, mainly occurring at the ends of words, caused most inflections to merge indistinguishably, or be dropped altogether. This inflectional breakdown could have created ambiguity (e.g. wanted man find ), but speakers compensated by using more rigid word order (subject – verb – object, usually), among other strategies.

Another important feature of the early ME period was the influence of Norman (and later, central) French, following the Norman conquest of 1066. French dominance and prestige in such contexts as the royal court, law, the church and education encouraged extensive borrowing of vocabulary e.g. French words for farmed animals pork , beef and mutton (modern French porc , bœuf and mouton ) were adopted alongside native words swine , cow and sheep .

The borrowed words came to signify only the meat of these animals, mainly eaten by wealthier French speakers, whereas the words inherited from OE came to refer only to the living animals. Norman scribes also influenced the way English was written, respelling words using conventions from French; thus OE îs became ice, cwçn became queen . However, by the 14 th and 15 th centuries, French influence in Britain had begun to wane, being replaced for many purposes by English.

An example of Middle English text can be seen in the start of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (manuscript early 15 th century)

Modern English (ModE) can be regarded externally as starting with the introduction of printing. Caxton’s selection of an East Midlands/London variety of English for the first printed books at the end of the 15 th century contributed to the development of a standardised variety of the language, with fixed spelling and punctuation conventions and accepted vocabulary and grammatical forms.

The perception of this standard variety as correct, ‘good’ English was also supported by attempts at codification, notably Johnson’s dictionary and many prescriptive grammars of the 18 th century. The vocabulary of English was consciously elaborated as it came to be used for an increasing variety of purposes, including translations of classical works rediscovered in the Renaissance, a burgeoning creative literature, and the description of new scientific activities. Thousands of words were borrowed from Latin and Greek in this period e.g. education , metamorphosis , critic , conscious .

An internal feature which characterised the movement towards ModE was the Great Vowel Shift – an important series of linked pronunciation changes which mainly took place between the 15 th and 17 th centuries. In ME, the sound system had contained broadly corresponding series of long and short vowels, represented in writing by the same letters.

For instance, the vowel in caas ‘case’ was simply a longer version of the vowel in blak ‘black’; similarly mete ‘meat’ (long vowel) and hell (short vowel), or fine (long) and pit (short). In early ModE, people began to pronounce the long vowels differently from the corresponding short vowels: long e ended up sounding like long i , leaving a gap in the sound system; this was filled by shifting the pronunciation of long a to sound like long e , and so on.

These changes were not reflected in ModE spelling, already largely fixed by standardisation, adding to the disparity between pronunciation and writing which differentiates English today from most other European languages.

An example of early Modern English can be seen at the start of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, First Folio (printed 1623)

In the present day, English is used in many parts of the world, as a first, second or foreign language, having been carried from its country of origin by former colonial and imperial activity, the slave trade, and recently, economic, cultural and educational prestige.

It continues to change at all linguistic levels, in both standard and non-standard varieties, in response to external influences (e.g. modern communications technologies; contact with other world languages) and pressures internal to the language system (e.g. the continuing impulse towards an efficient, symmetrical sound-system; the avoidance of grammatical ambiguity).

We need not fear or resist such change, though many people do, since the processes operating now are comparable to those which have operated throughout the observable and reconstructable history of English, and indeed of all other languages.

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A Brief History of the English Language: From Old English to Modern Days

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What Is the English Language, and Where Did It Come From?

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Today, English is one of the most common languages in the world, spoken by around 1.5 billion people globally. It is the official language of many countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

English is also the lingua franca of international business and academia and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Despite its widespread use, English is not without its challenges. Because it has borrowed words from so many other languages, it can be difficult to know how to spell or pronounce certain words. And, because there are so many different dialects of English, it can be hard to understand someone from a different region.

But, overall, English is a rich and flexible language that has adapted to the needs of a rapidly changing world. It is truly a global, dominant language – and one that shows no signs of slowing down. Join us as we guide you through the history of the English language.

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The English language is a West Germanic language that originated in England. It is the third most spoken language in the world after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. English has been influenced by a number of other languages over the centuries, including Old Norse, Latin, French, and Dutch.

The earliest forms of English were spoken by the Anglo-Saxons, who settled in England in the 5th century. The Anglo-Saxons were a mix of Germanic tribes from Scandinavia and Germany. They brought with them their own language, which was called Old English.

The English language has gone through distinct periods throughout its history. Different aspects of the language have changed throughout time, such as grammar, vocabulary, spelling , etc.

The Old English period (5th-11th centuries), Middle English period (11th-15th centuries), and Modern English period (16th century to present) are the three main divisions in the history of the English language.

Let's take a closer look at each one:

Old English Period (500-1100)

The Old English period began in 449 AD with the arrival of three Germanic tribes from the Continent: the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. They settled in the south and east of Britain, which was then inhabited by the Celts. The Anglo-Saxons had their own language, called Old English, which was spoken from around the 5th century to the 11th century.

Old English was a Germanic language, and as such, it was very different from the Celtic languages spoken by the Britons. It was also a very different language from the English we speak today. It was a highly inflected language, meaning that words could change their form depending on how they were being used in a sentence.

There are four known dialects of the Old English language:

• Northumbrian in northern England and southeastern Scotland,
• Mercian in central England,
• Kentish in southeastern England,
• West Saxon in southern and southwestern England.

Old English grammar also had a complex system, with five main cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and two numbers (singular and plural).

The Anglo-Saxons also had their own alphabet, which was known as the futhorc . The futhorc consisted of 24 letters, most of which were named after rune symbols. However, they also borrowed the Roman alphabet and eventually started using that instead.

The vocabulary was also quite different, with many words being borrowed from other languages such as Latin, French, and Old Norse. The first account of Anglo-Saxon England ever written is from 731 AD – a document known as the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People , which remains the single most valuable source from this period.

Another one of the most famous examples of Old English literature is the epic poem Beowulf , which was written sometime between the 8th and 11th centuries. By the end of the Old English period at the close of the 11th century, West Saxon dominated, resulting in most of the surviving documents from this period being written in the West Saxon dialect.

The Old English period was a time of great change for Britain. In 1066, the Normans invaded England and conquered the Anglo-Saxons. The Normans were originally Viking settlers from Scandinavia who had settled in France in the 10th century. They spoke a form of French, which was the language of the ruling class in England after the Norman Conquest.

The Old English period came to an end in 1066 with the Norman Conquest. However, Old English continued to be spoken in some parts of England until the 12th century. After that, it was replaced by Middle English.

Middle English Period (1100-1500)

The second stage of the English language is known as the Middle English period , which was spoken from around the 12th century to the late 15th century. As mentioned above, Middle English emerged after the Norman Conquest of 1066, when the Normans conquered England.

As a result of the Norman Conquest, French became the language of the ruling class, while English was spoken by the lower classes. This led to a number of changes in the English language, including a reduction in the number of inflections and grammatical rules.

Middle English is often divided into two periods: Early Middle English (11th-13th centuries) and Late Middle English (14th-15th centuries).

Early Middle English (1100-1300)

The Early Middle English period began in 1066 with the Norman Conquest and was greatly influenced by French, as the Normans brought with them many French words that began to replace their Old English equivalents. This process is known as Normanisation.

One of the most noticeable changes was in the vocabulary of law and government. Many Old English words related to these concepts were replaced by their French equivalents. For example, the Old English word for a king was cyning or cyng , which was replaced by the Norman word we use today, king .

The Norman Conquest also affected the grammar of Old English. The inflectional system began to break down, and words started to lose their endings. This Scandinavian influence made the English vocabulary simpler and more regular.

Late Middle English (1300-1500)

The Late Middle English period began in the 14th century and lasted until the 15th century. During this time, the English language was further influenced by French.

However, the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) between England and France meant that English was used more and more in official documents. This helped to standardize the language and make it more uniform.

One of the most famous examples of Middle English literature is The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, which was written in the late 14th century. Chaucer was the first major writer in English, and he e helped to standardize the language even further. For this reason, Middle English is also frequently referred to as Chaucerian English.

French influence can also be seen in the vocabulary, with many French loanwords being introduced into English during this time. Middle English was also influenced by the introduction of Christianity, with many religious terms being borrowed from Latin.

Modern English Period (1500-present)

After Old and Middle English comes the third stage of the English language, known as Modern English , which began in the 16th century and continues to the present day.

The Early Modern English period, or Early New English, emerged after the introduction of the printing press in England in 1476, which meant that books could be mass-produced, and more people learned to read and write. As a result, the standardization of English continued.

The Renaissance (14th-17th centuries) saw a rediscovery of classical learning, which had a significant impact on English literature. During this time, the English language also borrowed many Greek and Latin words. The first English dictionary , A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words , was published in 1604.

The King James Bible , which was first published in 1611, also had a significant impact on the development of Early Modern English. The Bible was translated into English from Latin and Greek, introducing many new words into the language.

The rise of the British Empire (16th-20th centuries) also had a significant impact on the English language. English became the language of commerce, science, and politics, and was spread around the world by British colonists. This led to the development of many different varieties of English, known as dialects.

One of the most famous examples of Early Modern English literature is William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet , which was first performed in 1597. To this day, William Shakespeare is considered the greatest writer in the English language.

The final stage of the English language is known as Modern English , which has been spoken from around the 19th century to the present day. Modern English has its roots in Early Modern English, but it has undergone several changes since then.

The most significant change occurred in the 20th century, with the introduction of mass media and technology. For example, new words have been created to keep up with changing technology, and old words have fallen out of use. However, the core grammar and vocabulary of the language have remained relatively stable.

Today, English is spoken by an estimated 1.5 billion people around the world, making it one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. It is the official language of many countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. English is also the language of international communication and is used in business, education, and tourism.

English is a fascinating language that has evolved over the centuries, and today it is one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world. The English language has its roots in Anglo-Saxon, a West Germanic language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons who settled in Britain in the 5th century.

The earliest form of English was known as Old English, which was spoken until around the 11th century. Middle English emerged after the Norman Conquest of 1066, and it was spoken until the late 15th century. Modern English began to develop in the 16th century, and it has continued to evolve since then.

If you want to expand your English vocabulary with new, relevant words, make sure to download our Langster app , and learn English with stories! Have fun!

Ellis is a seasoned polyglot and one of the creative minds behind Langster Blog, where she shares effective language learning strategies and insights from her own journey mastering the four languages. Ellis strives to empower learners globally to embrace new languages with confidence and curiosity. Off the blog, she immerses herself in exploring diverse cultures through cinema and contemporary fiction, further fueling her passion for language and connection.

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The year is 410AD. The Romans have returned to protect their capital, abandoning Britannia after a four-hundred-year reign. Invaders from Europe can't believe their luck. After being hindered by Roman defences for so long, the island is there for the taking! Sailing swiftly in their longships, they cross the North Sea, claiming their new territory as 'Englaland', or 'Land of the Angles'. With them, they bring new ideas, new beliefs, and a new language that will change the course of the island's history forever.

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This is the story of the Anglo-Saxons and the foundations they laid for the English language. In this article, we'll talk about the history of the invasion, inspect the Old English language and its quirks, and explore the wealth of essential literature the Anglo-Saxons produced during their reign in England. Oh, and we'll be sure to teach you a few Old English words along the way! Let's begin by defining some basic terms and then get on to the exciting stuff!

Ancient English

What is Old English, and how do we decide where it begins and ends? Let's start with a simple definition:

Old English is the name of the first ever stage of the English Language. It lasted between approximately 450AD and 1066AD, with an impact lasting well into the twelfth century.

The Old English period began following the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons.

The Anglo-Saxons were a cultural group comprised of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, three powerful Germanic tribes. Before invading England, they inhabited Scandinavia and northern Germany.

The Anglo-Saxon invasion began following the Roman evacuation of England in AD410. All Roman soldiers were ordered back to Rome to help with the ongoing battles taking place there, leaving England undefended and ready to be conquered. By 450, the Anglo-Saxons had a strong foothold across all of England, and with it spread the earliest known version of the English language, a West Germanic language closely related to Old Frisian and Old Saxon.

Did you know? At the southern edge of the North Sea in Germany and the Netherlands, the Frisian language is still spoken today by approximately 500,000 people. It's also the living language most similar to modern English!

The rule of the Anglo-Saxons lasted for over 600 years, during which Old English underwent many drastic changes.

After the successful invasion of the Normans marked an end to the reign of the Anglo-Saxons in 1066, the Old English language transitioned into what we now know as Middle English. This new version of the English language was grammatically simpler than its predecessor and had a fixed word order that helped to standardise the language.

Remember that attributing specific dates to an extensive period is both a challenge and an oversimplification. Proposing 450 to be the year that Anglo-Saxon influence reached Britain and 1066 to be the year that Old English became Middle English can give a false impression that the developments were sudden. In contrast, social change is gradual, fiercely contested, and takes tens, if not hundreds, of years to take effect. An Anglo-Saxon invader could not introduce the Celtic-speaking population to a West Germanic language overnight, nor could the Norman invaders phase out the five-hundred-year history of Old English in a day. Dates in literature are there to guide our understanding but not to impede or confine it. We encourage everyone to view the history of the English language as an ever-morphing melting pot of cultural influences.

Let's look in more detail at the changes in the Old English language over time.

Old English: language

In the hundreds of years before the Anglo-Saxon invasion, much of England's population spoke either a variation of Celtic or some form of Latin introduced by the Roman Empire. After the evacuation of the Romans in 410AD, the stage was set for a new dominant language to be introduced.

During the invasion, native Britons were driven away to Scotland, Ireland and Wales. This left the Anglo-Saxons to inhabit the region now known as England.

Old English dialects differed depending on geographic regions. The four main dialects at the time were Mercian, West Saxon, Kentish and Northumbrian. The Mercian and West Saxon dialects played an especially crucial role in the development of Old English and its evolution into Middle English.

This diagram shows the distribution of the four major dialects of England during the Anglo-Saxon reign.

While Old English largely stemmed from the Germanic language of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, many other influences have contributed to our language over time. For example, in the over 400-year history of the Romans in Britain, Latin words undoubtedly made their way into the Celtic language. In turn, when the Anglo-Saxons invaded, a portion of these Latin words found their way into the Old English language. The English language has always been, and will always be, a diverse range of vocabulary from an eclectic mix of cultures.

Today, only 20-33% of modern English vocabulary is derived from Old English. Other languages like Latin and French have had more of a lasting impact on the words we use today.

Old English: characteristics

Compared with later variants of English, Old English is characterised by a large number of inflexions which alter the meaning of words. The language takes a unique approach to verbs, nouns, grammar and punctuation, to the extent that understanding it today without further study is impossible. Take a look at this line from the 'Lord's Prayer' first in Old English and then in Modern English:

Fæder ure şu şe eart on heofonum

Our father, which art in heaven,

Although the two examples hold many similarities (Fæder/father), (eart/art), translating Old English without research would be challenging.

Old English: literature

The first traceable examples of Old English literature date back only to the seventh century and coincide with the introduction of Christianity to the Anglo-Saxon people. In this sense, the Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons is regularly portrayed as the most important event in Old English history and certainly one of immeasurable cultural significance.

Among other things, Christianity brought the idea of writing large manuscripts on parchment in Latin. In the 300 years of Anglo-Saxon rule before this, writing went no further than short messages inscribed in runic letters on stone and wood.

Without Christianity, it's possible that our understanding of Anglo-Saxon life and literature would be incomplete. Nearly all remaining manuscripts from the Old English period are religious and derive from the Church. Without the Latin literary culture that Christianity brought, it's likely that many surviving manuscripts would never have been written.

The earliest work of English Poetry that still survives, 'Cædmon's Hymn' , was composed between 658 and 680 but wasn't written down until the eighth century. C æ dmon (flourished 658AD–680AD) legitimised Old English verse by using it to write about Christian themes. He is now recognised as the earliest known English poet.

Even though 'Cædmon's Hymn' is the first work of written poetry, that doesn't mean that Anglo-Saxons weren't reciting poetic verses and stories for hundreds of years beforehand. Like many ancient cultures, oral storytelling was a significant part of Anglo-Saxon culture, and many stories were passed down and recited for generations!

Many poets from the Old English period are anonymous. Only four named poets: Bede (672/3AD-735AD), Cædmon, Alfred (848AD-899AD) and Cynewulf (flourished 9th century AD ) , have any work that survives today. Let's look in more detail at some defining examples from the period.

Undoubtedly the most famous example of Old English literature is the epic 3182-line poem Beowulf, believed to be composed between 700 and 750AD and committed to writing sometime in the eleventh century. The poem was originally passed down and performed as part of an oral storytelling tradition but was eventually preserved by two scribes. Despite the poem's pagan origins, Christian themes were added to the poem by the scribes, reiterating the prevalence of religion within all the period's written texts.

The poem tells the story of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who vanquishes Grendel, a dark monster descended from Cain. He also defeats Grendel's mother and, later in his life, a dragon. The narrative deals with themes like family, fame, pride, Christianity and warriors.

The Exeter Book

The Exeter Book (c.960-80) is a large codex containing a wide range of Old English poems. It is believed to have been collated in the 10th century AD, though many of the poems were likely passed down orally for generations. In recent times it has been recognised as one of the foundational volumes of English Literature and is seen as one of the world's most important cultural artefacts. It contains some of the most famous anonymous Old English poems, including 'The Wanderer', 'The Seafarer' and 'The Wife's Lament'. These poems are known as early examples of elegies:

In this context, an elegy refers to a serious poem designed for reflection and meditation.

For example, In 'The Wanderer', a man meditates on the meaning of life now that he has lost everything important to him. He is journeying to find a new life while reminiscing on past memories. The speaker reminds himself that God is the only solution to his problems, reemphasising the Christian themes present in many traditional Germanic narratives.

The number of surviving prose documents is far greater than that of poetry. This is partly due to the administrative nature of much of Old English prose writing. Charters, wills, medical documents, translations and religious scriptures were all commonly written to uphold legislation and thus were an important part of daily life.

Scholars put in a huge amount of work to translate Latin texts into Old English, both for religious and educational purposes. Other works chronicled key events, important laws and historical information. Let's look in more detail at the most important surviving example of historical prose in Anglo-Saxon history.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was compiled in 890 in an effort to document Anglo-Saxon history. It was created during the reign of King Alfred the Great (971-899). and is the first significant effort to chronicle English history year by year, making it invaluable to scholars studying the period. Especially enlightening are its recounts of Danish invasions and opinions regarding the reigns of specific kings.

Old English: words

Many common words that we use every day derive directly from Old English! For a bit of fun, let's look at some modern words, compare them to their old English counterparts, and detail where the Old English word originates.

You may notice that some words have multiple spellings (piper/pipor). This is because spelling in Old English wasn't standardised, meaning that different people may have written the same word differently.

Old English (450-1066) - Key takeaways

• Old English is the name of the first ever stage of the English Language. It lasted approximately between 450AD and 1066AD, with an impact lasting well into the twelfth century.
• Old English was brought to England by the Anglo-Saxons and slowly changed into Middle English after the invasion of the Normans.
• The most famous Old English work is 'Beowulf' an epic 3182-line poem composed between 700 and 750AD.
• Some other important Old English works of literature are The Exeter Book , Cædmon's Hymn and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
• When compared with later variants of English, Old English is characterised by a large number of inflexions which alter the meaning of words. To a modern English speaker, Old English is incomprehensible without study.
• Fig 1. Anglo Saxon Homelands and Settlements (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anglo-Saxon_Homelands_and_Settlements.svg) by Mbartelsm licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons
• Fig 2. Old English Dialects (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Old_English_Dialects.png) by CelticBrain (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CelticBrain) licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Frequently Asked Questions about Old English

--> what is old english.

Old English is the name of the first ever stage of the English Language. It lasted between approximately 450AD and 1066AD.

--> What are some examples of Old English? 

Some of the most important Old English works of literature are Beowulf ,  The Exeter Book , 'Cædmon's Hymn' and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

--> What is 'hello' in Old English? 

There are many ways to say 'hello' in Old English. One of the more popular sayings is 'Ƿes hāl!' meaning 'hello' or 'goodbye' (to one person).

--> How to speak Old English?

Old English is very different to English today, and would require careful study to learn! It is filled with grammar, punctuation and spellings that are completely alien to speakers of the modern English language.

--> How to write the date in Old English?

Here are the days of the week in Old English:

Monandæg - Monday

Tiwesdæg -Tuesday 

Wodnesdæg -Wednesday

Ðunresdæg - Thursday

Frigedæg - Friday

Sæternesdæg - Saturday 

Sunnandæg - Sunday

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What is the earliest work of English poetry?

In what century did the Christianisation of England occur?

Which historical text was created in 890 in an attempt to document Anglo-Saxon history?

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Who invaded England in 1066?

The Normans.

The Anglo Saxons were made up of which three tribes?

The Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes.

What were the dominant languages in England before Old English?

Celtic and Latin.

'Cædmon's Hymn'.

Old English poems including 'The Wanderer', 'The Seafarer' and 'The Wife's Lament' are known as early examples of ________?

The seventh century.

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A Thesaurus of Old English is conceptually arranged, and presents the vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon England within ordered categories. This allows the user to approach the materials of the Thesaurus by subject rather than through an alphabetic index as is the case for many thesauri. The provision of brief indications of meaning at all levels of this scheme allows word-senses to follow on from ideas explained, so that this thesaurus incorporates information about word meaning and could be described as an inside-out dictionary, with meanings first and then words.

The Thesaurus is edited by Jane Roberts and Christian Kay with Lynne Grundy. This online version enables users to pinpoint the range of meanings of a word throughout its history, their synonyms, and their relationship to words of more general or more specific meaning. In addition to providing hitherto unavailable information for linguists, historians of language, authors, students of English, and textual scholars, A Thesaurus of Old English is a rich resource for investigating social and cultural history, showing the development of concepts through the words that refer to them.

Quick Links

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Old English Vocabulary: Your First 700 Words

This is a list of approximately 700 of the most common or useful Old English words, given in normalized Early West Saxon forms. The goal of this list is to provide you with a relatively small core vocabulary to study so that you can move on to reading texts quickly. I recommend you use a spaced repetition system such as Anki to familiarize yourself with these words as quickly as possible. You do not need to be able to go from Present-Day English to Old English (at first, anyway) – just concentrate on being able to recognize the meanings of the Old English words. When you get to original texts, you will find them much less painful to read if you know these 500 words already. You'll cut your trips to the dictionary in half!

My eventual goal is to use this list to produce more graded reader-style Old English material which assumes you know this core vocabulary.

Abbreviations

Some abbreviations worth knowing:

• PoS: Part of Speech
• Decl/Conj: Declension class (for nouns) / Conjugation class (for verbs)
• 1: 1st declension nouns, i.e. masculine a -stem nouns, e.g. stān .
• 2: 2nd declension nouns, i.e. neuter a -stem nouns, e.g. sċip .
• 3: 3rd declension nouns, i.e. feminine ō -stem nouns, e.g. ġiefu .
• 4: 4th declension nouns, i.e. weak nouns, e.g. nama .
• 5: 5th declension nouns, i.e. u -stem nouns, e.g. sunu .
• 6: 6th declension nouns, i.e. consonant-stem nouns, e.g. mann .
• w1, 2, 3: 1st, 2nd, 3rd conjugation weak verbs.
• s1, 2, 3...: 1st, 2nd, 3rd... conjugation strong verbs.

This is version 0.2 of this list. On the roadmap:

• Divide the list into different grades based on frequency.
• Add quotations to show usage
• Add cognates to help learning.
• Add inflected forms, where they are very different from the dictionary form.
• Add major spelling/dialect variants.
• Correct the inevitable errors.
• Find better ways to display them than a table.

v0.2 (2022-02-26)

• Break out gender from part of speech.
• Add conjugation/declension class.
• Make separate entries for each part of speech a word is used as.
• Add entries for the 3rd person singular and plural present tense inflected forms of common storytelling verbs.
• Add entries for all forms of the demonstrative sē/þæt/sēo .
• Correct a few spelling errors (mostly missing palatal diacritics).

v0.1 (2021-11-19)

• First edition of the list.

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Letter of Recommendation

Letter of Recommendation: Old English

By Josephine Livingstone

• Jan. 4, 2019

I went to college a little bit later than most. Excited but nervous to plunge into a degree — in English literature — that demands all students learn Old English, I asked a friend what studying the language was like. “It sounds bizarre,” Roberta said, “but it’s what people spoke in Britain in the early medieval period. And there are these beautiful things called kennings in the poetry.” We were just in the pub, I think, but I got this feeling. Something like stars in my eyes, but more like starlight dancing on a deep, dark sea.

The phrase “Old English” is often styled with an extra e and used as a name for malt liquor or furniture polish. But it’s the name of a real tongue, the one that most people in Britain spoke before the Norman Conquest in 1066 A.D. (Middle English came next, before the dialect of Shakespeare.) It’s written in a slightly different alphabet to the one we have now, with the extra characters æ (said like the a in “cat”), þ (like the th in “thorn”), ð (interchangeable with þ) and ƿ (which sounds like w). It sounds musical, guttural, dark and rich, the aural equivalent of a peaty Scotch or a towering cumulonimbus cloud.

Old English became my favorite thing about college. The grammar is easy, so it’s not difficult to learn. And enough early medieval words survived into modern English that the vocabulary seems to unlock as you learn it — the Old English word is unlucan — like a long-stuck door to a hidden room in your own house. It feels like receiving a message that has looped around the entire intervening mess of modernity to find you.

The key, for me, was the kenning. Kennings are essentially portmanteaus, Old English words made of two nouns that have been mashed together to create a new one. At the bar that night with Roberta, I got it immediately: These kennings were metaphors of circumlocution, a way to talk around the thing you want to represent. For example, hron means “whale.” Rad means “a road,” or “a path.” Put them together, she said, and you get hronrad , or “whale-road,” which means “the sea.” The ocean is not an empty space, hronrad says — it belongs to the whale. Human beings crisscross it on our adventures, but when we do it, we are trespassing on a very large mystery.

Most Old English poetry, which is where kennings are found, is nothing like the Medieval Times version of the Middle Ages, with knights and ladies and jousting. Instead, Old English poems like “The Wanderer,” “The Seafarer” or “Beowulf” are terribly sad. It always seems cold. Snow ( snaw ) falls on a story about a lonely person (perhaps an anstapa , a lone-stepper), while social discord ripples beneath the poem’s surface. “Beowulf” is probably the most famous surviving Old English poem we have (there’s no knowing how much has been lost). The sole manuscript sits in the British Library, where anybody can go and look at it housed in bulletproof glass. In it, the anonymous poet describes war and death with kennings like “battle-sweat” for blood ( heaþuswate ), “mind-worth” for honor ( weorðmyndum ), “bonehouse” for body ( banhus ). In the scene describing Beowulf’s funeral, the poet refers to his body as a bonehouse that has broken open ( ða banhus gebrocen hæfde ). The smoke rises from his funeral pyre, interweaving with the sound of weeping ( wudurec astah . . . wope bewunden ). I love the winding together of smoke and sound: bewunden .

By describing Beowulf’s body as a bonehouse, cracked open by flames and surrounded by weeping, the poet communicates the body’s brittleness (how easily it breaks!) and the way that Beowulf had come to represent a whole institution in his society in a single word. When his body goes on the pyre, it’s like a house burning to the ground. None of that is explained, exactly — it’s just there in the kenning. Banhus is made of two disparate nouns, left to reconcile with each another in your head. A kenning is like a Rothko painting. It doesn’t make sense at first, but then it unfurls a beauty born of texture and contrast.

I’ve got no interest in establishing any personal connection between their culture and mine. That’s for the historians and the fantasists. I’m just interested in the words. There are ways of expressing feeling in the Old English kennings that do not exist in the formal English of today. Even if I were to dream up some delicious new portmanteau here — some melding of “history,” “poignant” and “solitude,” say — I still would not be creating a true kenning. That’s because, in our tongue, words get their meaning from the order we put them in: “Poignant” would end up modifying “solitude,” instead of the words just hovering next to each other in figurative space. We who speak contemporary English are so reliant on word order that we are no longer as able as our forebears to create lyrical, associative, figurative meaning in poetry. We just can’t do the same things with our vocabulary. Old English speakers can treat metaphor as an occasion to innovate; Modern English simply tries to describe. Their poetry can turn skeletons into exploding nation-states; we have to focus on keeping our adjectives in the right places. But to our immense good fortune, Old English poetry has survived, and we know how to read it. The kennings are out there waiting for you — so beautiful, so different and so very, very old.

Josephine Livingstone is a writer in New York.

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Meaning of essay in English

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• I want to finish off this essay before I go to bed .
• His essay was full of spelling errors .
• Have you given that essay in yet ?
• Have you handed in your history essay yet ?
• I'd like to discuss the first point in your essay.
• boilerplate
• composition
• dissertation
• essay question
• peer review
• go after someone
• go all out idiom
• go down swinging/fighting idiom
• go for it idiom
• go for someone
• shoot the works idiom
• smarten (someone/something) up
• smarten up your act idiom
• square the circle idiom
• step on the gas idiom

essay | American Dictionary

Examples of essay, collocations with essay.

These are words often used in combination with essay .

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Translations of essay

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Word of the Day

be chasing your tail

to be busy doing a lot of things but achieving very little

Binding, nailing, and gluing: talking about fastening things together

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Definition of essay

 (Entry 1 of 2)

Definition of essay  (Entry 2 of 2)

transitive verb

• composition

attempt , try , endeavor , essay , strive mean to make an effort to accomplish an end.

attempt stresses the initiation or beginning of an effort.

try is often close to attempt but may stress effort or experiment made in the hope of testing or proving something.

endeavor heightens the implications of exertion and difficulty.

essay implies difficulty but also suggests tentative trying or experimenting.

strive implies great exertion against great difficulty and specifically suggests persistent effort.

Examples of essay in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'essay.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Middle French essai , ultimately from Late Latin exagium act of weighing, from Latin ex- + agere to drive — more at agent

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 4

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 2

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“Essay.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/essay. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.

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Walter W. Skeat and the Oxford English Dictionary

Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology 

Anatoly Liberman's column on word origins,  The Oxford Etymologist , appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology articles via  email  or  RSS .

• By Anatoly Liberman
• April 17 th 2024

For many years, I have been trying to talk an old friend of mine into writing a popular book on Skeat. A book about such a colorful individual, I kept repeating, would sell like hotcakes. But he never wrote it. Neither will I (much to my regret), but there is no reason why I should not devote another short essay to Skeat. In 2016, Oxford University Press published Peter Gilliver’s book The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary , a work of incredible erudition. Skeat is mentioned in it many times, and I decided to glean those mentions, to highlight Skeat’s role in the production of the epoch-making work.

Twenty-six years separated the day on which the idea of the dictionary was made public and the appearance of the first fascicle. Countless people contributed to the production of the OED , but the public, if it knows anything about the history of this project, has heard only the name of James A. H. Murray , its first and greatest editor. This is perhaps as it should be, but in the wings we find quite a few actors waiting for broader recognition. One of them is Walter W. Skeat , a man of incredible erudition and inexhaustible energy. I have lauded him more than once (see, for example, the post for November 17, 2010 , reprinted in my book Origin Uncertain … .). However, today I’ll use only the material mentioned in or suggested by Peter Gilliver.

Skeat was not only the greatest English etymologist of his time (in a way, I think, of all times, despite the progress made by this branch of linguistics since 1912, the year he died). In 1873, he also founded the English Dialect Society and remained active in it as secretary and later director until 1896 (in 1897, after fulfilling its function, the society was dissolved). He edited the numerous book-length glossaries published by the society; attended its meetings wherever they were held, and without him Joseph Wright ’s work The English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905), still a source of inspiration to students of English, would probably not have been completed.

Among very many other things (!), he was a founding member of The Early English Text Society , and in 1865, he became a member of its committee. Neither post was “ceremonial,” for it presupposed a lot of work. Last but not least, Skeat was a generous man, a rare quality in scholars. For instance, he contributed a large sum of money to the Dialect Society at its inception, and much earlier, in 1885, he loaned Murray £1,660 for the purchase of a house in Oxford, the location of the future famous Scriptorium . Curiously, to this day, it is often the philanthropists who subsidize historical linguistics.

In the early eighteen-seventies, some influential people suggested that Skeat should become the main figure in the production of what became the OED . Fortunately, he concentrated on editing medieval texts and writing his etymological dictionary. He would not have become a second Murray, but by way of compensation, no one else would have done so much for the study of word origins and early English literature. Amazingly, Murray, a wonder of erudition, had little formal education and no university degree, while the Reverend Skeat’s background was in the classics. As individuals, Skeat and Murray represented different psychological types. Skeat was impatient and ready to bring out a book, not yet quite perfect, in the hope of a revised version. He would have been satisfied with a much smaller OED , while Murray made no concessions to haste (his invariable goal was absolute perfection, a wagon hitched to a star) and advised Skeat to wait for the completion of the OED before publishing his etymological dictionary. Fortunately, his suggestion fell on deaf ears, but Skeat’s readiness to agree that the text of the OED might be shortened infuriated Murray. (The episode was the result of a misunderstanding, and Skeat apologized.)

At that time, all thick dictionaries appeared in fascicles, which presupposed a good deal of competition among the lexicographers, the more so as a relatively small circle of publishers was involved. The people whom we know only from the names on the covers of their works were often not only colleagues and even friends but also rivals. At a certain moment, Skeat concluded that the Clarendon Press had declined to take on the OED and turned to the Press with an offer of his own etymological dictionary. As it happened, the two projects ran concurrently and did not get into each other’s way. Skeat’s work appeared in 1882, two years before the first fascicle of the OED came out. Murray once commented on Skeat’s dependence on the research at the OED , but Skeat responded rather testily that the OED had also had access to his findings. Yet Skeat remained Murray’s trusted friend and often maneuvered among various projects, to prevent other publishers from interfering with the OED . Though also hot-tempered, he was more diplomatic than Murray, and the relations between the two men remained friendly and even warm for years. To James Murray, Skeat’s death in 1912 was a heavy blow. He survived Skeat by three years. (Skeat: 1835-1912, Murray: 1837-1915.)

Throughout his life, Skeat supported the OED by his reviews (today it seems incredible that once not everybody praised Murray’s work) and kept chastising his countrymen for their ignorance and stupidity when it came to philology. He never stopped complaining that people used to offer silly hypotheses of word origins, instead of consulting the greatest authority there was. He also tried to encourage Murray, who often felt exhausted and dispirited. This is the letter he wrote to Murray, when he was working on cu -words: “I could find enough talk to cumber you. You could come by a curvilinear railway. Bring a cudgel to walk with. We will give you culinary dishes. Your holiday will culminate in sufficient rest; we can cultivate new ideas, & cull new flowers of speech. We have cutlets in the cupboards , & currants , & curry , & custards , & (naturally) cups . […] Write & say you’ll CUM!” Nor did Skeat stay away from the least interesting part of the work connected with the OED and often read the proofs of the pages before they went into print.

Gilliver states that Skeat’s support for the Dictionary and its editors in so many ways places him alongside Furnivall and Henry Hucks Gibbs. Gibbs was “a wealthy merchant banker (and director of the bank of England) who would go on to become one of the Dictionary’s greatest supporters… He had been reading for the Dictionary at least since July 1860.” And the somewhat erratic Frederick James Furnivall (1825-1910) earned fame as a central figure in the philology of his day, even though today only specialists remember him.

A picture of Furnivall can be seen on p. 12. Gibbs appears sitting in a comfortable armchair on p. 43, and on p. 67, an entry for rebeck “a rude kind of fiddle” (among other senses), subedited by Skeat, is photographed. Quite a few more bagatelles of this type can be produced by an attentive reader of Peter Gilliver’s monumental book, but for the moment, I’ll stay with Skeat.

Header: James Murray photographed in the Scriptorium on 10 July 1915 with his assistants: (back row) Arthur Maling, Frederick Sweatman, F. A. Yockney, (seated) Elsie Murray, Rosfrith Murray. Reproduced by permission of the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press.

Anatoly Liberman  is the author of  Word Origins And How We Know Them ,   An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction , and  Take My Word For It: A Dictionary of English Idioms .

Anatoly's latest book,  Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology  (OUP, 2024), is available to pre-order. 

His column on word origins,  The Oxford Etymologist , appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of  [email protected] ; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology articles via  email  or  RSS .

• Linguistics
• Oxford Etymologist

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