The Middle English Dictionary

Extract

The Middle English Dictionary inherited from the Oxford Dictionary about 450,000 slips containing Middle English quotations, generously donated to us by the Delegates of the Clarendon Press. We have also about 175,000 slips collected at Cornell under the editorship of Professor C. S. Northup. Before beginning to collect material on our own account it seemed wise to study the material we already had in order to discover just what material was needed to supplement it. For testing the Oxford Dictionary material we prepared what we called a “cross section.” We first selected 150 words which should be fairly representative of the whole Middle English vocabulary. All of the slips for these 150 words were removed from the files and were rearranged according to the texts from which they were taken, so that for every important text read for the Oxford Dictionary we have a sample body of slips running in number from 10 or 20 to 2200.