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Old English Dictionary Interface

This dataset contains an aligned index of major Old English dictionaries. It connects related entries across five lexical resources to create a unified reference system for Old English vocabulary. This dataset is an updated version of Martín Arista (2024).

Dataset Description

Dataset Summary
The Old English Dictionary Interface dataset maps related entries across five major Old English lexical resources: Bosworth-Toller, Clark Hall, Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader, the Dictionary of Old English (A-I), and the ParCorOE master lemma list. The alignment handles orthographic variations, different length-marking conventions, and morphological segmentation to identify and connect equivalent lexical items across these resources. The dataset includes 92,391 alignment rows, with 41.2% of entries successfully matched across two or more dictionaries. The alignment uses a three-tier normalisation strategy including dictionary-specific normalisation, canonical key harmonisation, and Ellis vocalic correspondences to maximise matching across resources with different orthographic conventions.

Languages
The dataset contains Old English (Anglo-Saxon) [ang] lexical entries spanning approximately 700-1100 CE.

Dataset Structure
The primary dataset file unified_index.tab is a tab-separated values file with the following structure:

Data Instances
Each row represents an aligned entry across dictionaries. Example:

canonical_key: abacan
normalised_form: ābacan
BT_headword: a-bacan
CH_headword: ābacan
Sweet_headword:
DOE_headword: a-bacan
ParCorOE: ābacan
POS: V
Gloss:
match_type: exact

Data Fields
canonical_key: The normalized form used for matching across dictionaries
normalised_form: The standardized display form with length marks preserved
BT_headword: The headword as it appears in Bosworth-Toller
CH_headword: The headword as it appears in Clark Hall
Sweet_headword: The headword as it appears in Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader
DOE_headword: The headword as it appears in the Dictionary of Old English
ParCorOE: The lemma form from the ParCorOE master lemma list
POS: Part of speech (when available and consistent across sources)
Gloss: A brief definition or gloss (primarily for disambiguation of homographs)
match_type: The method of matching used (exact, ellis_vocalic, or single)

Data Splits
The dataset does not have formal splits. It is a unified lexical resource.

Dataset Creation

The dataset was created by aligning entries from five major Old English sources, including four dictionaries and one parallel corpus:

-Bosworth-Toller (BT): 36,103 entries using acute accents (á, é, í, ó, ú)
-Clark Hall (CH): 36,700 entries using macrons (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū)
-Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader (Sweet): 25,922 entries with pipe separators for morphology
-Dictionary of Old English (DOE): 15,907 entries covering letters A-I only
-ParCorOE master lemma list: 33,922 entries used for lemmatization in corpus studies

Annotations
The dataset is not annotated beyond the alignment itself and the metadata fields described above.

Considerations for Using the Data

Social Impact of Dataset
This dataset aims to improve access to Old English lexical resources by creating a unified reference system. It facilitates research into historical English and supports computational approaches to Old English texts. By connecting related entries across dictionaries, it helps researchers and students navigate the sometimes inconsistent orthographic conventions used in different resources.

Discussion of Biases
The dataset inherits any biases present in the source dictionaries, which may include uneven coverage of certain semantic domains based on surviving texts, greater representation of religious vocabulary due to the nature of preserved texts, and potential gender and class biases in the election and definition of terms by the source dictionaries.

Other Known Limitations
The Dictionary of Old English only covers letters A-I, which limits full five-way alignments to these letters.
Some highly variant spellings may not be successfully matched.
Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader contains many cross-references that were excluded from alignment to avoid false matches.

Additional Information

Dataset Curators
Javier Martín Arista, Universidad de La Rioja

Licensing Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially

Under the following terms:
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

Citation Information

@dataset {oe_dictionary_interface_2026,
author = {[Javier Martín Arista]},
title = {Old English Dictionary Interface},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Hugging Face},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/[your-username]/old-english-dictionary-alignment}
}

Funding
This work was supported by grant PID2023149762NB-100 (Agencia Estatal de Investigación) and grant PRXX24/00108 (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades), which are gratefully acknowleged.

Source references
Bosworth, Joseph. and Thomas N. Toller. 1973 (1898). An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ellis, Michael. 1993. Old English Lexicography and the Problem of Headword Spelling. American Notes and Queries 6: 3-11.
Hall, John R.C. 1996 (1896). A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Revised Edition by Herbert T. Merritt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Healey, Antonette diPaolo (ed.). 2018a. The Dictionary of Old English in Electronic Form A-I. Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto.
Martín Arista, Javier (2024). Interface of Old English Dictionaries in Database Format: Toward a Knowldedge Base. In Javier Martín Arista and Ana Elvira Ojanguren López (eds.), Structuring Lexical Data and Digitising Dictionaries. Grammatical Theory, Language Processing and Databases in Historical Linguistics. Leiden: Brill. 150-183.
Martín Arista, Javier (ed.), Sara Domínguez Barragán, Luisa Fidalgo Allo, Laura García Fernández, Yosra Hamdoun Bghiyel, Miguel Lacalle Palacios, Raquel Mateo Mendaza, Carmen Novo Urraca, Ana Elvira Ojanguren López, Esaúl Ruíz Narbona, Roberto Torre Alonso & Raquel Vea Escarza. 2023. ParCorOEv3. An open access annotated parallel corpus Old English-English. Nerthus Project, Universidad de La Rioja, www.nerthusproject.com.
Sweet, Henry. 1976 (1896). The Student’s Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tichý, Ondřej; et al., 2021, Bosworth-Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary online, LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ digital library at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL), Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-3532.

README.md

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 - Corpus_Linguistics
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