Middle English Dictionary Middle English Dictionary The Middle English Dictionary is a dictionary of Middle English published by the University of Michigan. "Its 15,000 pages offer a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500, based on the analysis of a collection of over three million citation slips, the largest collection of this kind available." The project began in the 1920s. The first instalment, "Plan and Bibliography", containing a list of Middle English texts used for the "Middle English Dictionary", was published by Hans Kurath and Sherman Kuhn in 1954. More fascicles were published in numerous volumes (in alphabetical order) over
Oxford English Dictionary University of Waterloo, in Canada, volunteered to design the database. A. Walton Litz, an English professor at Princeton University who served on the Oxford University Press advisory council, was quoted in "Time" as saying "I've never been associated with a project, I've never even heard of a project, that was so incredibly complicated and that met every deadline." By 1989, the "NOED" project had achieved its primary goals, and the editors, working online, had successfully combined the original text, Burchfield's supplement, and a small amount of newer material, into a single unified dictionary. The word "new" was again dropped from