Old English

Thanks to Maurice Reed for his technical and testing assistance.

About Old English and Scots/Lallans

Old English (sometimes called Anglo-Saxon) is the earliest attested form of the English language. Old English grammar starts to change around 1100 after the Norman French invasion of 1066 resulting in Middle English. This caused the language to incorporate more French vocabulary and sounds. In addition, the grammar began to evolve to a form closer to Modern English.

Old English Links

• Oxford English Dictionary
• Old English Online
• The History of English

Scots/Lallans

The language of Scottish poets like Robert Burns (Auld Lang Syne) is called Scots or Lallans. It is a descendant of Old English and a close relative of Modern English. Scots preserves some archaic features of Old English including some consonants "ch" /x/ and some pre vowel shift pronunciations.

Note: Modern Scots uses English spelling, but older texts may use Old English letters.

About Scots/Lallans

• Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL)
• About Scots (DSL)
• Scots Online.Org
• Scots Language Centre

Old English Orthography

Old English, like most medieval languages, shows a wide range of diacritic marks and unusual characters which are no longer used in the modern language. Fortunately, most of the more commonly encountered issues such as thorn (þ), eth (ð), long ash (ǣ) and wynn (ƿ) can be displayed within Unicode.

Font Recommendations

Thorn (þ)/Eth (ð) and Long Vowels Ā-Ū

Because thorn (þ/Þ) eth (ð,Ð) are used in modern Icelandic, many common fonts listed below already contain these characters. These fonts also usually contain long vowels ā,ē,ī,ō,ū. These fonts include:

• Arial
• Calibri
• Cambria
• Century Gothic
• Century Schoolbook
• Comic Sans
• Georgia
• Helvetica
• Palatino
• Times New Roman
• Verdana

Note: If your version of one of the font listed above does not include long marks, make sure you have a recent version of Microsoft Office or Windows installed if possible.

Additional Characters

Fewer fonts contain characters such as long y (ȳ), long ash (ǣ), wynn (ƿ), yogh (ȝ) and C/G dot (ċ,ġ). Some of the ones that do are listed below.

Microsoft Office/Windows

• Arial
• Calibri
• Cambria
• Times New Roman
• Other Microsoft Fonts

Macintosh

• Helvetica
• Lucida Grande

Third Party Fonts

• Junicode Font
• Palemonas MUFI – Comprehensive and Includes bold/Italic
• Cardo
• Quivira Font – Also very comprehensive
• MUFI Fonts Page
• Noto Serif/Noto Sans (Google)

Windows International Keyboard Codes

In order to use these codes you must activate the U.S. international keyboard. Once the U.S. International keyboard has been activated, you can use the codes below.

Note: Other characters like wynn, yogh, and the long vowels must be inserted with the Character Map utility. or Word Numeric ALT codes.

Character Map

The Windows Character Map also includes the ability to insert vowels with macrons/long marks.

Windows Word Numeric ALT Codes

The following numeric codes work only in Microsoft Word, and you must use the numeric keypad. More detailed instructions about typing accents with ALT keys are available. 

Word ALT Codes

Manuscript Abbreviations

Below are codes for manuscript abbreviations amperagus (⁊) and slashed thorn (ꝥ), but you probably will need to download a comprehensive font to view them.

Macintosh Extended Keyboard Codes

Apple has provided additional keyboards which allow you to enter Old English characters via Unicode.

For vowels, thorns, eths and superscript dots

You can switch to or the US/ABC Extended keyboard and use these additional accent codes.
Note: Another option is to insert them via the Character Viewer/Palette.

Other Characters

You can switch to the Unicode Hex Input keyboard and use these Option numeric codes. Once entered, these letters can be cut and pasted
as needed. Another option is to insert them via the Character Viewer/Palette.

Note: You may need to download a comprehensive font to view manuscript conventions such as abbreviations amperagus (⁊) and slashed thorn (ꝥ).

HTML Accent Codes

Unicode Encoding

If you use long marks, Unicode (utf-8) is the required encoding for Web sites. If the following encodings are used instead, you may encounter display problems:

Avoid These

• iso-8859-1 (Latin 1),
• iso-8859-15 (Latin with euro (€) symbol)
• win-1252 (Windows 1)

Language Tags

Language Tags allow browsers and other software to process text more efficiently.

Language Codes:

• ang (Old English/Anglo-Saxon)
• enm (Middle English)
• sco (Scots/Lallans)

The HTML Entity Codes

Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you want
to type ġeþwǣre, you would type ġeþǣre. These numbers are also used with the Word Numeric ALT codes listed above.

HTML Entity Codes for Old English

Manuscript Abbreviations

Below are codes for manuscript abbreviations amperagus (⁊) and slashed thorn (ꝥ), but you probably will need to download a comprehensive font to view them.

Links

Freeware Fonts

Both Microsoft and Apple provide fonts with Old English support, but they are
sans-serif fonts. These fonts include the characters and are serif fonts, which tend to be more readable for
medieval languages.

• Junicode Font
• Palemonas MUFI – Comprehensive and Includes bold/Italic
• Cardo
• Quivira Font – Also very comprehensive
• Andron Scriptor Web
• Leeds Unicode
• MUFI Fonts Page

Additional Information

• Old English and Middle English Scripts in Unicode – Phologica Net
• Representing Middle English Manuscripts on the Web with UTF-8
• Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI)

Old English Language

• Oxford English Dictionary
• Old English Online
• The HIstory of English

Scots/Lallans Language

• Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL)
• About Scots (DSL)
• Scots Online.Org
• Scots Language Centre

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