Anglo-Norman words

For the modern reader, the words ‘locust’ and ‘lobster’ refer to two very different species of the animal kingdom and at first glance they do not seem to have much in common. ‘Locust’ (the modern English word for an insect associated with migrating hordes that ravage whole areas of countryside, especially in Africa and Asia, by consuming all vegetation in their path) derives from the Old French and Anglo-Norman word  locuste  ( DMF locuste , from Latin  locusta : ‘insect’, locust’, ‘grasshopper’). It is hardly surprising that several textual references we have to locusts in Anglo-Norman sources are from religious texts, as locusts are alluded to not only as one of the plagues of Egypt in the Old Testament Exodus (Ex. 10:1-20) but also as one of the horrors inflicted upon the earth in the Apocalypse or the Book of Revelation (Revelation 9:3-10), the last book of the New Testament. One such text is an illustrated Apocalypse commentary from the thirteenth cen...

In an Anglo-Norman prose lapidary from the second half of the thirteenth century – a study of the medical ‘powers’ of different stones and minerals, claiming to derive its knowledge from a letter which  the mysterious Arabian king Evax  wrote  to Emperor Tiberius – we find the following recommendation: “La rousse [celidoine] est bone a houme qui chiet de passion et a home lunage”  Lapid  149.xxvi.7 (“The red [chelidonius] (=a small stone taken from the gizzard of a swallow) is good for someone who suffers epilepsy and for a ‘lunatic’ person”) Leaving aside the question of how effective the use of a piece of red chelidonius would have been in these matters, we would like to concentrate on the word lunage . The adjective derives from lune  (Latin luna : ‘moon’), followed by the (normally substantival) suffix - age , and is the Anglo-Norman equivalent to Latin lunaticus . This particular word formation is no longer extant in Modern French ...

At this time of year, our thoughts turn to Christmas foods – particularly to sweets and confections. A search of the use of the term ‘sweetmeat’ in the AND2 (one can search the translations or glosses in the dictionary from the homepage) shows that an international array of sugary goods was available in medieval England. For those unfamiliar with the English term, sweetmeat is used to describe any kind of confectionary – candied fruit, nuts etc. – nothing ‘meaty’ involved despite the name – ‘meat’ is used here in the original sense of ‘food’ and not ‘flesh’. This should not be confused with the similar sounding sweetbread – which is definitely neither sweet nor bread! Even the OED can’t explain that one! Confection was the general term used in Anglo-Norman for any compound preparation – a mixture which included a number of ingredients. It was also used as a term for preserves, a mixture of fruit and sugar. From the Latin confectio , the word is attested in Middle English ...

The Nativity in the Bedford Hours: London, British Library, MS Additional 18850, f. 65r. - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2012/12/a-royal-gift-for-christmas.html#sthash.0F4dY9c5.dpuf It may be a little early for Noel , but already offer you a present in the shape of a novel version of the dictionary: we have proceeded not only with the online publication of the second edition of the letter N – from naal to nuus – but also with the introduction of some entirely new functionalities. Work on the letter N in the course of 2013 coincided with a novation (‘the alteration of a contract to include a new person’), that is the inclusion of Katariina Nära to the project team. She has been working, since April, on the addition of a new feature now part of AND#2: an entirely new section at the top of the article (just below the headword and variant forms) provides live links and/or references to other relevant dictionaries. These wi...

Pending online publication of the second edition of ‘N’, AND revision work continues with the editorial team currently gathering information, citations and references for the letter ‘O’.  To offer a glimpse of the process: it has already become apparent that while AND#1 only had one entry for organe , AND#2 (the second, online edition) will have (at least) two: one musical and one herbal. The first entry (which was already present in AND#1), now becoming organe 1 , is derived from Latin organum. The word can be traced back to Greek οργανον, which originally referred to a tool or instrument to work with (cf. εργον, Greek for ‘work, task’), and more specifically to a musical instrument. That latter meaning persisted in medieval times, and the DMLBS lists as its 5 th sense: ‘musical instrument that can be tuned’ (DMLBS 2053a). Whereas the modern musical sense of ‘organ’, i.e. an instrument using pipes sounded by keys, is already well-attested in medieval Latin organum ...

While gathering information for the revision of the AND, one of the sources available to the editorial team is the collection of ‘gleanings’ previously made by contributors. Certain texts were read completely and any number of noteworthy words, phrases or citations were set aside – in earlier days handwritten on slips or on typed lists, but more recently copied in digital files – for later consideration. Sometime in the late 1990s Dr. Lisa Jefferson contributed in such a way, and gathered material from (among other sources) the manuscripts of the Merchant Taylor accounts – which otherwise would not have been available to the AND. Her ‘gleanings’ for ‘H’ from these documents belonging the London guild of tailors included the following intriguing phrase: ‘Item pur .vij. havegooddays , un pur le stretdore, pris .iiij. d. et pur l’autres .vj. d. – xij d.’ It is a single entry in a list of payments made during the second year of the reign of Henry VI (1423). Two seemin...