What is it about?
If you want to know the answer to the question 'Did the Anglo-Saxons have a word for it?', the TOE is a good place to start looking. The article is about the contents and structure of the TOE, and about how it came into being.
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Why is it important?
The TOE is a self-standing thesaurus of the English vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon England, published in two volumes (1995, 2000) and available as a searchable resource online (https://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/).. The incorporation of its data into the Historical Thesaurus of English enables for the first time viewing English words that disappeared by 1150 alongside those that continued in use, both in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (2009) and in Glasgow University's Historical Thesaurus of English (https://www.growkudos.com/publications/).
Perspectives
Writing this article allowed me to reflect on a process that took many years, and incidentally to consider many changes encountered. For example, the establishment of the Toronto Dictionary of Old English project made it possible to review many of the word senses assembled from standard scholarly dictionaries, and I was fortunate to have the advice and help of computing colleagues at a time when Digital Humanities departments scarcely existed. It was particularly pleasurable to discuss the project’s history within the interdisciplinary context centered on the Evoke platform <evoke (ullet.net)> developed by Sander Stolk at the University of Leiden.
Jane Roberts
University of London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Thesaurus of Old English, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik, November 2021, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/18756719-12340234.
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