THE OLD ENGLISH VOCABULARY

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

An Old English dictionary contains about 20,000 words, of which only a few hundred are not Germanic.
The others, which form an overwhelming majority, may be classified into three groups, as B.A. Ilish rightly
points out:

1. Words of Indo-European origin (used in Old English, in other Germanic languages, and in non-
Germanic Indo-European languages), e.g. feeder (‘father’) modor (“mother”), nama (“name”), fot (“foot”),
heorte (“heart”), niht (“night”) : neowe (“new”), ,riht (“right”), long (“long”), sittan (“to sit”), beran (“to
bear”), teran (“to tear”), liczan (“to lie down”) etc. ,

2. Words of Germanic origin (used in Old English and different other Germanic languages, but
not in other Indo-European languages), e.g. core (“earth”) see („sea”), heall („hall”), sand („sand”), earm
(„arm”), eald(„old”), ceald („cold”), bindan(„to bind”) , findan („to find”), singan („to sing”) etc.

3. Specifically English words (not to be found in any other languages) e.g. dipian („to speak, to
call”). They are very few in number.

The Old English vocabulary is almost purely Germanic, but about 85 per cent of it has gone out of
use. Nevertheless, this percentage is not to be taken at its face value for as Simeon Potter points out, „ a
very great part of the vocabulary of the most original prose, four-fifths perhaps, still lives. Out of one
hundred words of the account of King Cynewulf`s death [ in the Parker Chronicle] fourteen gave
disappeared from the language altogether, three (atheling, mickle, and yare) are archaic or dialectal, but
all other eighty-three are still in daily use, however much meanings, functions and forms may have been
modified.

Therefore, many of the Old English words that have disappeared belong to the highly poetic
vocabulary. Nowadays, although more than half of the word to be found in an English dictionary are of
Romanic origin, the basic word stock of the language has remained mostly Germanic. Indeed, it is quite
obvious that the names of the nearest family relationships, of most parts of the body, of many common
plants, animals, tools, weapons, colours, shapes, of the simplest moral qualities are of Germanic origin.
As N. Rayevskaya says, „despite the borrowings already made before the Anglo-Saxons settled in Britain
and despite the large-scale borrowings of the later periods, native words are still at the core of the
language. They stand for fundamental things dealing with everyday objects and things. It is therefore quite
evident that native element forms the foundation and framework of the modern English vocabulary. The
native stock includes auxiliary and modal verbs, most verbs of the strong conjugation, pronouns, most
numerals, prepositions and conjunctions. The frequency value of these elements in the English vocabulary
is not open to doubt. Ordinary English and the vocabulary of colloquial speech embrace fewer loan-words
than, say, the language of technical literature. Almost all commonly used English words are Anglo-Saxon
in origin.

This conclusion is fully borne out by the following analysis of the origin of the one thousand most
frequently used words in Modern English:

Of Old English origin 61.7 per cent

French 30.9
 Latin 2.9

Scandinavian 1.7

Mixed 1.3

Uncertain 1.3

Low German and Dutch 0.3

Although Old English did not contain most of the numerous Romanic elements that are to be found in
Modern English, it was far from a poor language: on the one hand, a large number of words that exist
today were not yet necessary, for they name things, notions and phenomena which were to appear much
later owing to the gradual development of production and of all fields of human activity; on the other
hand, one of the chief characteristics if Old English was its great resourcefulness

John William Clark rightly points out the necessity of viewing this problem carefully: “ In speaking
of the size of the Old English vocabulary we must bear several considerations in mind. (1) The total
vocabulary of New English, as recorded, with some approach to completeness, in the largest of the most
recent dictionaries, is, as compared with other languages both ancient and modern, uniquely,
prodigiously, and indeed absurdly huge: the average Englishman today probably uses, ordinarily, no more
words than the average Frenchman or German, but quite certainly uses smaller fraction of the total
recorded and recognized vocabulary of his language. Accordingly, when we say that the Old English
vocabulary was small, we mean relatively to that of New English – not nearly so small relatively to that of
most other modern languages. (2) The Old English vocabulary is certainly very incompletely recorded:
extant Old English documents are comparatively few and short, and limited in range of subject matter and
genre, and lack, more or less by chance, instances of thousands of words that must have actually (even
though perhaps only rarely) been used. (3) The Old English vocabulary of the year 1050 was much larger,
more various, more precise, more subtle and more easily expansible than that of about two hundred year
earlier.