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Updated on:
8/9/17

 

E 313: OLD ENGLISH


Vocabulary

Cotton Junius XI

For a word-count of the entire poetic corpus, click here.

You can download the Corpus of Old English from the Oxford Text Archives. The first four files contain the entire Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus, taken from Krapp & Dobbie's Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records.

To measure word frequency, 1) I removed all punctiation and extraneous matter from the files, leaving only words. 2) Then, I substituted "th" for all thorns and eths, and substituted roman letters for other runes. 3) This left a very long string of words; so, I substituted a carriage return for every space, leaving a single word on each line. 4) finally, I piped a sort command to uniq, then to another sort ( sort FILENAME | uniq -c | sort -r ) --following the advice of the Natural Language Group at USC. Here are the results for file 1, containing the contents of British Library MS Cotton Junius xi:

NB. Nouns are underlined.

Words used 100 or more times:

1079
on   280 þaer
942 þa 249 þurh
823 þaet 227 þaes
780 and 204 of
575 þe 186 me
520 him 169 ofer
497 to 165 nu
466 he 150 is
418 ond 147 god
371 ne 145 þonne
364 waes 143 for
351 ic 133 aer
346 swa 117 under
329 se 115 we
326 þu 112 ac
325 mid 111 wordum
321 þam 103 aefter
303 his 102 eorðan
294 hie 101 þone
287 in    

 

Words used 50 to 99 times:

97
siððan   68 waldend
97 drihten 67 bearn
92 wið 66 hwaet
92 hine 65 seo
86 waeron 65 gode
83 wearð 64 ongan
82 wuldres 64 hu
82 aet 63 weard
80 þaere 63 sunu
78 eft 62 faeder
77 word 62 ealle
77 heo 61 þeah
76 waere 61 maeg
74 wolde 60 us
74 gif 59 þara
74 engla 58 up
73 oððaet 58 þin
73 cyning 57 forð
72 haefde 56 ymb
70 ge 56 hit
    56 gewat
    56 ece
    55 be
    54 sceolde
    54 biþ
    51 sceal
    51 her
    51 heora