Revision of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (letters R & S)

Some 70% of the words used in modern English can be traced back to a common source: Anglo-Norman, the dialect of French introduced into the British Isles as a result of the Norman Conquest of 1066 which was to serve as a language of literature, law, commerce, education, and administration into the late Middle Ages. Wherever one looks - historical chronicles, medicinal treatises, legal records - the central role played by Anglo-Norman in the life of medieval Britain is evident.
The most comprehensive account of the vocabulary of this language is the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND). The idea of the AND was conceived over seventy years ago, and culminated originally in a series of volumes printed between 1977-92 (AND1). This was soon overtaken by a thorough programme of revision to produce a widely expanded dictionary - freely available online since 2006 (www.anglo-norman.net). As the recognised authority on the Anglo-Norman lexis, crowned by the award of the Prix Honoré Chavée by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris (2011), the online AND has become an indispensable tool not only for a broad congregation of academic specialists such as linguists, lexicographers, historians, and literary scholars, but also for a constant influx of non-specialists, such as teachers, pupils, and amateur historians and genealogists, wishing to know more about this crucial aspect of their heritage.
The current project will continue the revision of AND in two key ways.
First, following the successful completion of the revision of the entries for letters A-Q, the AND will now revise letters R & S over a 48-month period, at a rate of approximately 750 entries per annum. The revision process re-investigates and improves every current AND1 entry for semantic detail and textual coverage, and adds new entries for the many new words which have been newly located. For the sake of illustration, in the recently revised N- entries, the number of substantive entries more than doubled (from 339 to 887), as did the number of senses (931 to 2088), with four times the number of illustrative citations (from 1075 to 4218).
The revision of R & S will also raise their entries to the higher academic standards which distinguish the online AND's entries from those of AND1 and make it a versatile tool for studying Anglo-Norman in its multilingual and sociological context. These include the systematic cross-referencing of all entries to those in dictionaries of medieval French, Latin, and English; the addition of searchable 'usage labels' in definitions, which allow the analysis of the language through domains, or onomasiological fields; and the addition of editorial commentaries highlighting linguistic, semantic, or historical aspects of more complex entries.
Second, the online AND will undergo a significant transformation into a historical dictionary. The AND was originally conceived as a semantic dictionary, intended to show the meanings of words but not their development over time. Increasingly, as the online AND has incorporated hyperlinks to cognate dictionaries which outline the diachronic development of their entries, users have assumed, despite warnings to the contrary, that the organisation of the online AND is also historic and provides the earliest attestations of words. In order to reinforce the central position of the AND in the study of the Anglo-Norman language, this project will introduce a diachronic dimension into the revision of R & S, by locating and highlighting earliest attestations of words and senses. This approach will also be applied retrospectively through a semi-automated process to the existing online entries for A-Q and U. This innovation will ensure a better understanding of the development and use of Anglo-Norman, and will have important benefits for our perception of the history of the English language and of the nature of medieval Britain's multilingual society.

The online AND currently receives almost 400,000 entry views per year from users in 75 different countries, many of whom are not from the academic sector.
In particular, the OED benefits from its collaboration with the AND by obtaining data essential to completing its understanding of the history and development of the English language. In this way, the AND's work enriches the reading of the millions worldwide who rely on the OED as the standard reference work for their study and use of the English language. The AND's revision of R and S and the introduction of a historical dimension will enhance this service.
As part of the present bid, the AND will formalise its history of cooperation with the Anglo-Norman Text Society (ANTS) into a project partnership. For over 75 years, ANTS has operated as a registered charity dedicated to promoting and supporting the study of Anglo-Norman language and literature, with members - university and public libraries, learned societies, and private subscribers - spread across five continents. The sharing of knowledge, information, and resources in this partnership will constitute an important new contribution of AND to the charitable sector.
Since the AND is freely available online, many of its users are members of the public interested in any of the many areas to which Anglo-Norman is essential: the development of English and French languages, genealogy, place names, socio-cultural history, and much more. This interest continues to grow in conjunction with media attention to the commemoration of historical events, such as the 950th anniversary of the Norman Conquest in 2016 and the 800th anniversary of the death of William Marshal in 2019. To promote the Dictionary to the wider public, we maintain a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/ANDonline), which unites an ever-growing community of people from over 40 countries and garners over 2000 'reaches' a month, together with Twitter (https://twitter.com/ANDictionary) to inform people about events, discoveries, and posts on social media relating to Anglo-Norman and the Middle Ages more generally. We also use these social media channels to provide updates on the progress of the AND and to highlight our monthly blog (www.anglonormandictionary.blogspot.co.uk), which discusses interesting Anglo-Norman words, phrases, or semantic fields in an accessible manner which encourages reposting (such as by the Office du Jèrriais, which promotes the use of the Jersey language). Our public engagement also takes other forms, such as talks to local medieval re-enactment societies and, via Skype, to Canadian students interested in the origins of the English language, as well as answering the many questions emailed by users from across the globe. In addition to continuing these activities, we will enhance our public engagement, reaching new audiences, as explained more fully in the Pathways to Impact, by:
1. visiting local archives to assist with, and educate archivists in, the identification of Anglo-Norman material. This will take the form of targeted seminars about the nature, status and use of Anglo-Norman in the British Isles during the medieval period, as well as tips on how to distinguish it from Continental French, which will be offered to archives and archivists within the area of Wales and the Marches.
2. the creation of digital learning materials and tutorials explaining the impact and identification of Anglo-Norman. These will be developed primarily for archivists and lay historians but will also be freely available on the AND website to a more general public.
3. visiting local museums and historical societies associated with the above archives to talk about Anglo-Norman and its importance during the Middle Ages and its influence on Modern English.