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 between PR, marketing and scholarship and one can argue that its biggest problem is the critical uptake of the work by the interested public. In his review of the 1982 supplement, University of Oxford linguist Roy Harris writes that criticizing the "OED" is extremely difficult because "one is dealing not just with a dictionary but with a national institution", one that "has become, like the English monarchy, virtually immune from criticism in principle". He further notes that neologisms from respected "literary" authors such as Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf are included, whereas usage of words in newspapers or other less