A Worlde of Wordes: Dictionaries and the Rise of Middle English Lexicography

From the first vision and first articulation of plans for national and period dictionaries of English to the completion of the Middle English Dictionary, decades, even lifetimes, have passed. Begun tentatively at Oxford and Cornell Universities, the project got underway in earnest at the University of Michigan in 1930. Seventy-one years later the last fascicle was sent to the publisher and thirteen volumes comprised of 55,000 entries and over 900,000 quotations were completed. "A Worlde of Wordes" honors the men and women, the process, and the scholarship responsible for this feat.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120289/1/worlde_of_wordes_01.pd

Initial position in the Middle English verse line

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in English Studies in July 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0013838X.2014.924275This paper establishes that spelling forms collected from initial position in the Middle English verse line have unique characteristics, and it discusses why this is so. The paper first addresses scribal copying practices, before describing the utility of letter-based N-gram models in objectively comparing scribal copies in terms of their spelling. Testing of models trained on a corpus totalling ten manuscripts demonstrates that initial position regularly prompted scribes to suppress their tendency to introduce their own spelling forms in favour of replicating those encountered in their exemplars. The discussion attributes this behaviour to the operation of two mechanisms. One mechanism is psycholinguistic in origin, while the other is rooted in manuscripts’ production and so implies a codicological dimension to spelling variation