Revising the coverage of Old English in the OED

Old English (or Anglo-Saxon, as it is sometimes called) is the term used to refer to the oldest recorded stage of the English language, i.e. from the earliest evidence in the 7th century to the period of transition with Middle English in the mid-12th century.

In character and structure, Old English is very different from the English that succeeded it. Like Latin, Old English has grammatical gender, a declensional system for nouns and adjectives, and a series of verbal conjugations. It has been remarked with some truth that 'the language of "Beowulf" would be as unintelligible to a man of Chaucer's time as it is to the modern reader who has not studied Old English'.

Partly for this reason and partly because reliable editions of Old English texts had not at that time been produced in sufficient numbers, the original editors of the OED chose not to include the vocabulary of Old English in their dictionary as a matter of course. James Murray states the policy explicitly in the 'General Explanations' (1888) to the New English Dictionary (NED):

'The present work aims at exhibiting the history and signification of the English words now in use, or known to have been in use since the middle of the twelfth century. This date has been adopted as the only natural halting-place, short of going back to the beginning, so as to include the entire Old English or 'Anglo-Saxon' Vocabulary... We exclude all words that had become obsolete by 1150. But to words actually included this date has no application; their history is exhibited from their first appearance, however early.'

So Old English material was to be admitted to the OED only when required to illustrate the early history of words used after 1150.

The Third Edition of the OED, while continuing to adhere to this policy, is bringing to bear the fruits of more than a hundred years of scholarship in the study of Old English. There is now a plethora of reliable editions of Old English texts, a comprehensive dictionary of Old English is in progress (based in Toronto), and the whole corpus of Old English is now available in searchable electronic form. All of this has revolutionized lexicographical methods.

The revision of Old English material in the Third Edition will be thoroughgoing. Every single Old English quotation, whether already in OED or newly added, is being checked against the most recent reliable edition of the text, with new bibliographical details and additional context being given where appropriate. Dating of quotations has been radically revised, with NED's assumed composition dates replaced by a simple threefold division of all pre-1150 quotations into 'early OE' (up to 950), 'OE' (950-1100), and 'late OE' (1100-1150), based firmly on manuscript dates as agreed by the most recent scholarship.

One of the most exciting aspects of the wholesale review of Old English material for the Third Edition is the number of antedatings being discovered of words and senses for which NED gave only later evidence. Already in revised material published to date over fifty words have been pushed back beyond the 1150 threshold into Old English. Among some of the more interesting are the following (dates in brackets are former earliest attestations in the Second Edition): the name of the month March (c1200); the occupations of marshal (1258) and miller (1362); and the names of the Roman deities Mars (c1374), Mercury (1340-70), and Minerva (1375). Sometimes the very margin of the antedating is itself startling, e.g. meadowland (1653), mint 'to make a coin by stamping metal' (1546), and the record holder so far, mind (a term for a Celtic lunula or crescent-shaped neck ornament), antedated to Old English from 1862.