Revision of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (Letters T-Z)

The significance of Anglo-Norman in its own day and its long-term impact on the development of modern English lexis cannot be overstated: this dialect of French was introduced in Britain after the Norman Conquest in 1066, and was used extensively for over four centuries, attested by its use in several million texts relating to all areas of medieval life in Britain, such as literature, law, religion, commerce, science, education and administration. As a result, Anglo-Norman became instrumental in shaping almost two thirds of the English vocabulary, as recorded by the OED. The Anglo-Norman Dictionary was conceived eighty years ago as a comprehensive account of the vocabulary of this language and culminated in a series of volumes printed between 1977-92 (AND1). A programme of revision and digitization soon followed to produce a widely expanded, online dictionary (AND2), which has been freely available since 2006 (www.anglo-norman.net). Recognized by the Prix Honoré Chavée by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris (2011) for its contribution to the study of Anglo-Norman, the online AND has established itself as the authoritative resource on Anglo-Norman, providing an essential tool for a wide range of users: academic specialists, including linguists, literary scholars, archivists and historians, as well as non-specialists interested in the life and languages of medieval Britain.

The current project constitutes the final phase which will bring almost three decades of AND revision to a successful end. Following the completion of the revision of the entries for letters A-S, the AND editorial team will now revise the remainder of the dictionary, those entries found under letters T-Z, over a 42-month period, at a rate of approximately 600 entries per annum. The revision process re-investigates and greatly improves every current AND1 entry for semantic detail and textual coverage and adds new entries for the many words not previously noted. For the sake of illustration, in the 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 T-Z will also raise these 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 cognate entries in dictionaries of medieval French, Latin, and English; the dating and chronological presentation of all citations, which together with the identification of the earliest attestation expand the AND from originally a purely semantic dictionary (providing definitions of words) to also a historical one (tracing the history of words); the addition of searchable semantic tags 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.

In addition to this, a new system of searchable 'language tags' will be introduced throughout the entirety of the dictionary, allowing users to search specifically for loanwords and borrowings in Anglo-Norman. Furthermore, the editorial team will carry out a focussed re-examination of 25 mixed language source texts and add the results to the entirety of the Dictionary. The combination of these additional materials and the new search option will provide new insights into the multilingual nature of medieval Britain and its international contacts.

The final months of the project will allow the editors to consolidate the data across all editorial stages, ensuring consistent data for all future studies into the lexis of Anglo-Norman.