The Middle English Dictionary

Historical lexicography began at U-M in 1927 when the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary agreed to supply materials gathered for the English of Shakespeare's time as the foundation for a supplementary dictionary. In 1930, collections of Middle English--1150 to 1500--arrived from Cornell and from Oxford so that two dictionaries might be begun here and coordinated with each other.

Great progress ensued in the following decade, but with the outbreak of war in 1939 the first of the dictionaries was "indefinitely postponed" and the second delayed. In 1946, after the war, Hans Kurath came from Brown to take over the editorship of the Middle English Dictionary, and publication was begun in 1954. Kurath retired in 1961, and was followed as editor by Sherman M. Kuhn; he and his colleagues published successive parts of the dictionary regularly until he in turn retired in 1983. Robert E. Lewis then took over the editorship, and he occupies the unusual position of an historical lexicographer who brought a major work, at long last, to completion.

In mid-summer, the last part of the MED will appear in print and, at the same time, the whole work will be available to subscribers on-line through the Middle English Compendium, a link among the dictionary, the texts, and a detailed bibliography of manuscripts and editions. U-M and subscribing institutions can find this resource at: http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/mec/

In early May, the completion of this huge work will be celebrated at an international conference beginning with festivities at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo and continuing with a gala meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America in Ann Arbor. For more information please visit: http://www.hti.umich.edu/d/dsna/

More than seventy years have passed since the MED was begun here!

It's a happy day for Michigan.

Use of the MED

With its full documentation of the technical and specialized vocabularies of the period as well as the more general and literary ones, the MED is an indispensable tool for both scholars of Middle English language and literature and other medievalists: social, political, and economic historians, philosophers, historians of science and medicine, musicologists, art historians, etc. In addition, because the Middle English period is the threshold to Modern English, our language spoken and written today, the MED is consulted by those interested in the late development of the English language, including lexicographers and etymologists, who take the MED data and findings into consideration in their own works; this is especially true of the editors of the forthcoming 3rd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, who have made extensive use of the on-line MED.

A Day in the Life

The Middle English Dictionary is full of curious words, but more curious are those words that we might expect a time-traveler to London in 1400 to encounter in an ordinary day. A keu in the kitchen(e might bring you fined braun in a foil trap(pe. A draper might make you a lin purs(e in a lovely shade of plunket. Maybe a clog(ge maker might use his lest(e to make you a sho. To top everything off, you might stop by the chapeler who will make you a hat. With the electronic dictionary, it's easy to find clusters of such terms by searching on cooking or clothing in the definitions. Not to mention tracking down an image in Chaucer. All the words in bold here are shown in the forms used for main entries in the dictionary. To conduct a search of your own click here.