2008 – 14 fiche. ISBN 978-0-88844-931-1 $29.95
Order from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS)
This eighth fascicle of the Dictionary of Old English, the letter G, consists of 1,319 headwords in 3,454 pages, on microfiche. The material on which G is based represents a fresh look at all surviving Old English (except some multiple copies of texts), an estimated four million running words.
The publication of the first online version of the Dictionary of Old English: A to G occurred in December 2007, followed in April 2008 by the Dictionary of Old English: A to G on CD-ROM. This present publication of G on microfiche is intended for those scholars who, for various reasons, are not able to use the electronic DOE. Although microfiche publication presents a static dictionary rather than a dynamic text, at the very least it allows the dissemination of new research to colleagues and students engaged in the study of Old English, sometimes under very challenging circumstances.
The introductory fiches present an updated bibliography of the Old English texts which comprise the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, alphabetized by Short Title, together with their system of reference. We have also included an updated bibliography of the Latin source material cited in the Dictionary of Old English. The list of Latin sources is ordered by author for named texts and by Short Title for anonymous texts. These bibliographies supersede all previous bibliographies issued by the project.
As with the letter F, the publication of G on microfiche went directly from electronic files to microfiche without the production of a paper copy as an intermediary stage. As all checking was done interactively at terminals, there was an enormous saving of time. We hope to have caught as many errors as possible, but we would be grateful to receive notice of any remaining errors or anomalies. Please write to corpus@doe.utoronto.ca
The Dictionary of Old English provides an inventory and description of the English language from its earliest appearance in written records, ca. 600. It is intended to complement the Oxford English Dictionary for the earliest period of the language; indeed, the Dictionary of Old English will catalogue the Old English vocabulary deliberately excluded from the OED because it failed to survive past 1150.
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.
Fascicle G was prepared by Antonette diPaolo Healey, Joan Holland, Dorothy Haines, David McDougall, and Ian McDougall, with the assistance of Nancy Speirs and Pauline Thompson, using materials assembled by the late Angus Cameron.
