Description : This is an online edition of An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, or a dictionary of "Old English". The dictionary records the state of the English language as it was used between ca. 700-1100 AD by the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of the British Isles.
This project is based on a digital edition of An Anglo-Saxon dictionary, based on the manuscript collections of the late Joseph Bosworth (the so called Main Volume, first edition 1898) and its Supplement (first edition 1921), edited by Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, today the largest complete dictionary of Old English (one day to be hopefully supplanted by the DOE). Alistair Campbell's "enlarged addenda and corrigenda" from 1972 are not public domain and are therefore not part of the online dictionary. Please see the front & back matter of the paper dictionary for further information, prefaces and lists of references & contractions.
The digitization project was initiated by Sean Crist in 2001 as a part of his Germanic Lexicon Project and many individuals and institutions have contributed to this project. Check out the original GLP webpage and the old Bosworth-Toller offline application webpage (to be updated). Currently the project is hosted by the Faculty of Arts, Charles University.
In 2010, the data from the GLP were converted to create the current site. Care was taken to preserve the typography of the original dictionary, but also provide a modern, user friendly interface for contemporary users.
In 2013, the entries were structurally re-tagged and the original typography was abandoned, though the immediate access to the scans of the paper dictionary was preserved.
Our aim is to reach beyond a simple digital edition and create an online environment dedicated to all interested in Old English and Anglo-Saxon culture. Feel free to join in the editing of the Dictionary, commenting on its numerous entries or participating in the discussions at our forums.
We hope that by drawing the attention of the community of Anglo-Saxonists to our site and joining our resources, we may create a more useful tool for everybody. The most immediate project to draw on the corrected and tagged data of the Dictionary is a Morphological Analyzer of Old English (currently under development).
We are grateful for the generous support of the Charles University Grant Agency and for the free hosting at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University. The site is currently maintained and developed by Ondrej Tichy et al. at the Department of English Language and ELT Methodology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic).
Wikipedia plain text data obtained from Wikipedia dumps with WikiExtractor in February 2018.
The data come from all Wikipedias for which dumps could be downloaded at [https://dumps.wikimedia.org/]. This amounts to 297 Wikipedias, usually corresponding to individual languages and identified by their ISO codes. Several special Wikipedias are included, most notably "simple" (Simple English Wikipedia) and "incubator" (tiny hatching Wikipedias in various languages).
For a list of all the Wikipedias, see [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias].
The script which can be used to get new version of the data is included, but note that Wikipedia limits the download speed for downloading a lot of the dumps, so it takes a few days to download all of them (but one or a few can be downloaded fast).
Also, the format of the dumps changes time to time, so the script will probably eventually stop working one day.
The WikiExtractor tool [http://medialab.di.unipi.it/wiki/Wikipedia_Extractor] used to extract text from the Wikipedia dumps is not mine, I only modified it slightly to produce plaintext outputs [https://github.com/ptakopysk/wikiextractor].
[Contributions for the XVth World Economic History Congress in Utrecht, the Netherlands, from 3 to 7 August 2009 (Session I9: Public Activity of Businessmen at a Local and Countrywide Level in 1800-1914).]