A frequency dictionary of Old English prose for learners of Old English and historical linguists

Abstract

A Frequency Dictionary of Old English Prose is a list of Old English words arranged according to their frequency, covering the whole York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et al. 2003), i.e. an electronic collection of all prose texts written in Old English. Thus, if you want to get a quick insight into a prose text written in Old English, you should start your study with the first entries. The dictionary includes all the words which occur at least 25 times in the corpus (over 2,700 entries altogether). Each lexical item is accompanied by its part of speech classification, translation into Modem English, an authentic example from the corpus (carefully handpicked to include the most basic words and thus be understandable even to beginners), the absolute frequency of the word in the corpus and the number of texts where it appears at least once.