Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
This is a list of English words inherited and derived directly from the Old English stage of the language. This list also includes neologisms formed from Old English roots and/or particles in later forms of English, and words borrowed into other languages (e.g. French, Anglo-French, etc.) then borrowed back into English (e.g. bateau, chiffon, gourmet, nordic, etc.).
The word barn comes from the Old English bere, for barley (or grain in general), and aern, for a storage place—thus, a storehouse for barley. [4] The word bere-ern, also spelled bern and bearn, is attested to at least sixty times in homilies and other Old English prose. [5] The related words bere-tun and bere-flor both meant threshing floor.
Bairn is a Northern England English, Scottish English and Scots term for a child. [1] It originated in Old English as "bearn", becoming restricted to Scotland and the North of England c. 1700. [2] In Hull the r is dropped and the word Bain is used. [3]
Yan Tan Tethera or yan-tan-tethera is a sheep-counting system traditionally used by shepherds in Northern England and some other parts of Britain. [1] The words are numbers taken from Brythonic Celtic languages such as Cumbric which had died out in most of Northern England by the sixth century, but they were commonly used for sheep counting and counting stitches in knitting until the ...
However, there are exceptions: weep, groom and stone (from Old English) occupy a slightly higher register than cry, brush and rock (from French). Words taken directly from Latin and Ancient Greek are generally perceived as colder, more technical, and more medical or scientific – compare life (Old English) with biology ( classical compound ...
In this way, the HTE arranges the whole vocabulary of English, from the earliest written records in Old English to the present, alongside dates of use. It is the first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world's languages and contains 800,000 meanings for 600,000 words, within 230,000 categories.
Old English (Englisc or Ænglisc, pronounced [ˈeŋɡliʃ] or [ˈæŋɡliʃ]), or Anglo-Saxon, [1] was the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages.
Old High German antrahho seems to be a combination of ant (cognate of Old English ened) and trahho (cognate of drake), but the OED holds that the conjectured cognate in Old English (unattested *andrake) "has no basis of fact". The word ened likely has a PIE origin, compare Latin anas, Lithuanian antis and Old Greek nēssa ('duck