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Middle English Dictionary

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The Middle English Dictionary is a dictionary of Middle English published by the University of Michigan . It comprises roughly 15,000 pages with a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage for the period 1175–1500, based on the analysis of over three million quotations from primary sources. It is the largest collection of this kind available.

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9-471: The project began in 1925. The first installment, "Plan and Bibliography", containing a list of Middle English texts used for the dictionary, was published by Hans Kurath and Sherman Kuhn in 1954. More fascicles were published in numerous volumes (in alphabetical order) over the next several decades. The dictionary was completed in 2001. In 2007, the full dictionary was made freely available and searchable online in an HTML format. This article about

18-458: A dictionary is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Hans Kurath Hans Kurath (13 December 1891 – 2 January 1992) was an American linguist of Austrian origin. He was full professor for English and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor . The many varieties of regional English that he encountered during his trips convinced him of the necessity of completing

27-780: A linguistic atlas of the Eastern United States , The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States . Kurath was born in Villach , Austria-Hungary . He emigrated to the United States in 1907 and became a US citizen in 1912. He studied at the Universities of Texas and Chicago . He did his Ph.D. in 1920. Afterwards, he became professor in German at Northwestern University (1920–1927) and then professor for German and Linguistics at

36-592: A systematic study of American English . In 1926, he convinced the Modern Language Association to begin planning for the project, and in 1931, a pilot study of the New England region was initiated under his direction, eventually producing the Linguistic Atlas of New England . It soon became clear, however, that the undertaking was too complex to be completed by a single team of linguists. The project

45-627: The Ohio State University (1927–1931) and Brown University (1931–1946). In 1946, he became Full Professor for English and Linguistics at the University of Michigan , Ann Arbor (1946–1962). In 1941, he was president of the Linguistic Society of America . In 1959, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago. He died in Ann Arbor, Michigan , at the age of 100. His wife

54-401: The contemporary United States. Kurath was convinced that language held a living record of events like the growth of trade and transport systems, urbanization, and population movements. By plotting regional differences in vocabulary and pronunciation on maps, Kurath and other researchers assembled what they hoped was a visual record of the social processes that had transformed American English over

63-452: The past 200 years. Each regional operation used similar techniques: a small team of linguists fanned out across the region interviewing at least two people in every county. Kurath gave the researchers explicit instructions about the types of informants who were considered appropriate for the project. In every town or city selected for the project, at least two people would be chosen, one had to be "old-fashioned and unschooled," Kurath suggested

72-523: Was the dance ethnologist Gertrude Prokosch Kurath , daughter of Eduard Prokosch , a historical linguist. Kurath's chief research interest was historical linguistics and his primary goal was to use the Linguistic Atlas to reconstruct the evolution of American English from the relatively "pure" forms of English brought to the United States by the early settlers to the regional dialects that existed in

81-657: Was thus expanded to eight additional regional operations. Kurath guided the vision and goals of the regional projects for three decades and oversaw the publication of a series of volumes that are known collectively as the Linguistic Atlas of the United States , the first linguistic atlas of the US. For that work, he received the Loubat Prize . He was also the first main editor of the Middle English Dictionary . Additionally, together with Raven I. McDavid, Jr. , he published

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