Old English replacement of the letter ƿynn with w. This is a proclamation from King Cnut the Great to his earl Thorkell the Tall and the English people written in AD 1020. Unlike the previous two examples, this text is prose rather than poetry. For ease of reading, the passage has been divided into sentences while the pilcrows represent the original division. The earliest history of Old English lexicography lies in the Anglo-Saxon period itself, when English-speaking scholars created English glosses on Latin texts. At first these were often marginal or interlinear glosses, but soon came to be gathered into word-lists such
Witch (word) Witch (word) The word witch derives from the Old English nouns "wicca" ('sorcerer, male witch') and "wicce" ('sorceress, female witch'). The word's further origins in Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European are unclear. The Old English verb "wiccian" has a cognate in Middle Low German "wicken" (attested from the 13th century, besides "wichelen" "to bewitch"). The further etymology of this word is problematic. It has no clear cognates in Germanic outside of English and Low German, and there are numerous possibilities for the Indo-European root from which it may have been derived. Other suggestions for the underlying root are untenable or widely rejected: