Old French-English Dictionary

Book excerpt: This is the first Old French-English dictionary of its kind to provide a comprehensive reference tool for a broad range of English-speaking users. In the form of a compendious but manageable single volume, it is designed for both the general and specialist reader of Old French texts including students, scholars, philologists and historians. The dictionary is based on a large and varied number of texts up to c.1350, starting from the 'classics' of medieval French literature and extending through all the genres: epic, romance, religious, moral, didactic and allegorical texts, lyric poetry, drama, humour and satire, as well as non-literary historical, political and legal documents. The aim has been to include a wide range of variant spellings as well as the main dialectal forms to help the anglophone user in particular. Detailed definitions and grammatical functions are provided, together with common phrases with their translations.