Libraries

The Dictionary of Old English (DOE) defines the vocabulary of the first six centuries (600 - 1150 CE) of the English language, using today's most advanced technology. The DOE complements the Middle English Dictionary (which covers the period 1100 - 1500 CE) and the Oxford English Dictionary (which documents the development of the English language to the present), the three together providing a full description of the vocabulary of English.
The Dictionary draws on as wide a range of texts -- in date, dialect and genre -- as possible. It differs from previous dictionaries in several important features: a listing in a simplified paradigmatic order of every spelling which is attested for a word in the Electronic Corpus; frequency counts for each word in the corpus so that readers can know what proportion of the evidence has been cited; usage labels where they are statistically significant, noting restrictions to a class of texts, to an author, or to a particular period or dialect; exhaustive citation for all words of twelve or fewer occurrences.