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A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching, 14)

A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching, 14)

List Price: $22.95
Your Price: $22.95
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: I won't give it 5 stars because...
Review: ... this is more a lexicon than a dictionary. But it is the only affordable and valuable one on the market, behind the great (but very expensive) Bosworth and Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dict. Thus, sometimes you might not find the word you're looking for. So be smarter than the lexicon: search another word derived from the same root, suppress the prefixes, change the cases, think of the infinitive of the verbs, and you may finally obtain your translation of the word.
But let us be honest: this book is great, and affordable for most of us.
A classic ?

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: intended for teaching use, but a great help to writers
Review: A wonderful source for Anglo-Saxon words and their meanings, which is very reasonably priced. Intended as a teaching aid, I have found it very helpful to the writer of period history and fiction.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Affordable, and adequate for general use
Review: Easy to read, but codes must be looked up constantly in the front of the book. The ubiquitous ge- is dropped, so only the root is given, indented slightly. Well-constructed paperback.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Hear, hear.
Review: I just wanted to say that the reviewer below is right about the reviewer below him being wrong.


Rating: 5 stars
Summary: I use mine all the time.
Review: I use my CONCISE ANGLO-SAXON DICTIONARY all the time. It's indespensible.

As far as the bad review everyone is writing about - you should see this Wyatt guy's website. His review is the sanest thing about the guy.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Indispensable but frustrating
Review: The problem with Clark Hall isn't that it doesn't give word pronunciation. The problem with Clark Hall is that so often its definitions are bad. My favourite is his defintion of "wigblac", which only appears in Exodus to describe the war-ready Israelites, as "bravely caparisoned."

The other problem with Clark Hall is that there isn't really any other choice, unless, of course, you're willing to make the commitment to shell out a few hundred for the Bosworth Toller and to subscribe to the Dictionary of Old English.

But there is one good thing about it. The lengthy and circular paths you'll follow around the pages of the dictionary, going through different sound changes, to find the word you need (look up y, go to i, go to ie, do not pass Go, do not collect $200) will be frustrating enough that you might just buckle down and learn the words by heart.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good book, idiotic review
Review: This book does a good job of bringing together a lexicon of Old English words. Other than screwing up the thorn/eth thing that another reviewer commented on, it did just fine.

As an aside, the previous review is just incredibly stupid. This is a language dictionary, and is obviously very much like a Spanish-English dictionary, not like the OED. On top of that, Old English is a dead language, why do you need the pronunciation so badly? Let me know next time you have a conversation with King and Saint Alfred the Great or the Venerable Bede.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Word Hoard More Than a True Dictionary
Review: This book is a great word hoard. The best word hoard in Old English. I only gave it for stars because it is NOT a dictionary as it claims. I wanted a Oxford style dictionary where I could easily flip through and find out how to pronounce these un-pronouncable Old English words. This book gives the word and its meaning, however, you must turn to the front of the book for the pronouncation guide. This is NOT a dictionary. This is a word hoard. A long list of words and their meaning. Period. I don't know of any true dictionary in Old English, albeit, many books claim to be. Wyatt Kaldenberg

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A good, affordable dictionary
Review: This is simply the best Anglo-Saxon dictionary you can find for anything resembling a reasonable price. It helps to know a little bit about the language (for example, the "ge-" prefix is used much the same way that it is in German). The only serious problem I found is Hall's using the "eth" character for cases where "thorn" is used in the original texts--a serious scholarly failure, though one that the serious student should be able to overlook with relative ease. I do feel that this dictionary could use quite a bit of revision--anyone up to the task?--but at the same time, it's the best you can find for the price, and certainly worth the money.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A good, affordable dictionary
Review: This is simply the best Anglo-Saxon dictionary you can find for anything resembling a reasonable price. It helps to know a little bit about the language (for example, the "ge-" prefix is used much the same way that it is in German). The only serious problem I found is Hall's using the "eth" character for cases where "thorn" is used in the original texts--a serious scholarly failure, though one that the serious student should be able to overlook with relative ease. I do feel that this dictionary could use quite a bit of revision--anyone up to the task?--but at the same time, it's the best you can find for the price, and certainly worth the money.


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