![]() The new dictionary resurrects long-dead words and unearths the ancestors of many words we still use today. When finished, it will be more comprehensive than any dictionary of English – more detailed than the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon dictionaries of 18, and more exhaustive than the venerable 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. Along the way, generations of dedicated scholars have rediscovered medieval ways of thinking and re-assessed the meaning of texts from the Middle Ages. Now 46 years in, the project involves six staff and an army of students. ![]() In a sense, it’s a project that will catalogue the very DNA of our language. The team behind the Dictionary of Old English, an ambitious, long-term project based at the Centre for Medieval Studies, has set out to define every known English word used between the years 6. He knew that defining every sense of heofon would be a challenge, but at that moment his most pressing concern was that someone might fly past the table and inadvertently blow away the carefully ordered slips. Pelle’s goal was to create a hierarchy for these meanings. Each slip contained a different citation of heofon and each pile represented a different sense or meaning of the word. The newly hired drafting editor had sorted scads of Post-it notes and more than 4,000 slips of paper into precarious piles. Yet his job that day was not so heavenly (or heofonlic, as it would have been spelled 1,200 years ago). Pelle already had years of experience proofing Old English words. ![]() An assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies – where he also earned his PhD – Dr. Hunched over a table, he laboured like a medieval monk reviewing every citation of heofon in the corpus of Old English texts. ![]() On a scorching summer day two years ago, his first day on the job as a drafting editor at the Dictionary of Old English, Stephen Pelle was tackling heaven – or more accurately, was trying to define heofon, its Old English equivalent. ![]()
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