Anglo-Norman words

Do you ever wish you had a way to see into the future, to see how events might play out? The editors at the AND would certainly love to have this ability! As evidenced by a numerous medieval writings, the desire to predict or foretell the future, or predire in Anglo-Norman, has been a longstanding wish of many. Two of the most recent additions to the Dictionary library are Tony Hunt’s Writing the Future: Prognostics Text of Medieval England ( Textes littéraires du Moyen Âge 24, Paris, 2013 ) and Stefano Rapisarda ’s Manuali medievali di chiromanzia ( Biblioteca Medievale 95, Rome, 2005 ). Both of these books contain editions of Anglo-Norman texts which could be used to tell the future – texts to interpret the lines on hands, the meaning of dreams, the zodiac, the moon, the stars... [1] Palmistry, BL Additional 11639, f. 115 Lunarie , a term attested in another prognostic text edited by T. Hunt [2] , refers to a ‘lunary’, a text that provides a collection of predictions...

It is with extreme sadness that we report the death of our chief editor, Professor David Trotter, after a battle with cancer. Not only is the loss to the field of historical lexicography immense., we will also greatly miss our friend and mentor.  While the editors will continue their work revising the entries for P-, we will be taking a temporary break from the Word of the Month out of respect for him.

A term that may be familiar to the casual Googler of 'Anglo-Norman' as much as to professional horse-breeders is 'the Anglo-Norman Horse'. Historians may point out that this particular breed was one of the main saddle-horses used by the French cavalry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Sports lovers might know it as a former show jumping horse or a nineteenth-century trotting racer. In the second half of the twentieth century the breed was abandoned and combined with other types in the Selle Français - France's national saddle horse breed. However, in recent decades attempts have been made to re-instate the Anglo-Norman as a separate breed once more. (The Anglo-Norman horse,  Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (1890—1907) It is perhaps only the Anglo-Norman linguist who might be confused in thinking that this is an ancient breed, dating back to medieval times and the Norman invasion. Was the cavalry of William the Conqueror as we see ...

One of the other changes in the dictionary entries that users might notice, aside from the new usage tags and the addition of references to cognate words in other dictionaries, involves the content of the entries. The addition that is likely to interest a wide variety of users is that we are beginning to note the use of certain terms as surnames, where we have attestations of such a use. ( Bede roll of the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary (1349-50), Parker Library) The inclusion of surnames in dictionaries is not without difficulties. As we mentioned earlier this year in our discussion of the words  pastry/pie , often the language of surnames is problematic: names frequently occur in lists which may follow a bilingual or trilingual text. How then to determine the language of the name? In general, we try to err on the side of inclusion, as frequently surnames attest to Anglo-Norman (as well as Middle English and Latin) words far earlier than they appear in literary or a...