English

Contact

Western Libraries

Ask a Librarian

Dictionaries

Dictionary of Old English Corpus
Publication Date: 2009-
The Dictionary of Old English is based on a computerized corpus comprising at least one copy of each text surviving in Old English. The body of surviving Old English texts encompasses a rich diversity of records written on parchment, carved in stone, and inscribed in jewelry. These texts fall into several categories: prose, poetry, glosses to Latin texts, and inscriptions. In the prose in particular, there is a wide range of texts: saints' lives, sermons, biblical translations, penitential writings, laws, charters and wills, records (of manumissions, land grants, land sales, land surveys), chronicles, a set of tables for computing the moveable feasts of the Church calendar and for astrological calculations, medical texts, prognostics (the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the horoscope), charms (such as those for a toothache or for an easy labour), and even cryptograms.
The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (3rd edition) by Chris Baldick
Publication Date: 2009
The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms provides clear, concise, and often witty definitions of the most troublesome literary terms. Now available in a new, fully updated and expanded edition, it offers readers increased coverage of new terms from modern critical and theoretical movements, such as feminism, schools of American poetry, Spanish verse forms, life writing, and crime fiction. It includes extensive coverage of traditional drama, versification, rhetoric, and literary history, as well as updated advice on further reading and a pronunciation guide to more than 200 terms. New to this fully revised edition are recommended entry-level web links. Boasting over 1,200 entries, it is an essential reference tool for students of literature in any language.

Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words—past and present—from across the English-speaking world. As a historical dictionary, the OED is different from those of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. You'll find these in the OED, but you'll also find the history of individual words, and of the language—traced through 3 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals, to films scripts and cookery books. The OED started life more than 150 years ago. Today, the dictionary is in the process of its first major revision. Updates revise and extend the OED at regular intervals, each time subtly adjusting our image of the English language. Also available in print, PE1625.M7 1989.

Middle English Compenium
The Middle English Dictionary offers a comprehensive analysis of the lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500, based on the analysis of over three million citation slips, the largest collection of its kind available. This electronic version of the MED preserves all the details of the print MED, but goes far beyond this, by converting its contents into a searchable database. The MED is also available in print, PE679.M54.
LEME: Lexicon of Early Modern English
Lexicons of Early Modern English is a historical database of monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopedias, hard-word glossaries, spelling lists, and lexically-valuable treatises surviving in print or manuscript from the Tudor, Stuart, Caroline, Commonwealth, and Restoration periods. Texts of word-entries whose headword (source) or explanation (target) language is English tell us what speakers of English thought about their tongue in the period; served by the Short-title and Wing catalogues, from the advent of printing to about 1700.
More Dictionaries