Anglo-Norman words

Describing the meaning and semantic range of Anglo-Norman words has always been, and still is, the primary function of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary. However, the online AND ( www.anglo-norman.net ) also provides material, tools and research possibilities for medievalists, linguists and many other disciplines. When Dr. Alan Chamberlain, Senior Fellow in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Nottingham, visited us last week, to talk about a new and exciting project he proposes between his Mixed Reality Lab (University of Nottingham) and the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, the cross-disciplinary potential of online AND resources was clearly central to his ideas. Dr. Chamberlain explains his views on scholarly innovation through incorporating Anglo-Norman and the AND in his Experimental Digital Humanities and Sound Art: Funnily enough I’d been reading a book on medicine in medieval society and had come across the Anglo-Norman word mire referring to a specific sort of medi...

The starting-point for this investigation is on the one hand the Anglo-Norman gigeler , attested only in one text, William of Waddington’s Manuel des péchez , a didactic and moralising treatise from the last quarter of the fourteenth century. The verb gigeler , “to frolic”, is generally treated in the dictionaries as a derivative of the relatively well-attested giguer , itself apparently based on gigue , “a stringed musical instrument, smaller than a viol”, ultimately from Old High German gîga (modern German Geige ; cf. FEW gîga , 16,35b). There is some (literary) evidence that the instrument came to France from Germany. Giguer itself, perhaps surprisingly, does not appear to be attested in Anglo-Norman, but the musical instrument gigue and gigur (the player thereof) both are; both, too, are borrowed into medieval English (MED ğige n.2 ; ğigŏur n. ). (OED’s gigue , the musical composition, is not attested until 1685 and as the pronunciation reveals, is a later French borrowing.)...