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
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary development of a word. Headwords are traced back to their earliest usage. Includes 97,600 headwords, 25,250 variant spellings, 500,000 definitions, 87,400 illustrative quotations and 7,333 sources of quotations (including 5,519 individual authors). The Fifth Edition was published in 2002, and contains more than half a million definitions, with 83,500 illustrative quotations from 7,000 authors. The name Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was used to emphasise the link between this two-volume dictionary and the original twenty-volume OED. On 21 September 2007, the Sixth Edition appeared. The dictionary now includes 600,000 words, phrases, and definitions, covering global English-speaking regions and 2500 new words