English Language

20th century onwards Welcome to the My Subject page for English Language.

This page highlights some of the information resources specific to this subject. You will find more general resources on the My Subject page for English.

Key Resources

Reference works

Dictionary of Old English: A to G online
An ongoing project to define the vocabulary of the first six centuries (600 - 1150) of the English language.
Middle English Dictionary
An online version of the 2001 print edition. It provides a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500.
Oxford English Dictionary
Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English 1150-1325
An interactive online atlas, designed to enable regional and chronological linguistic study of English during this period.
Key to English placenames
A project hosted at the University of Nottingham that gives the etymology of thousands of English places spread.
Germanic-Lexicon Project
Contains coverage of the lexicons of the early Germanic languages.
Thesaurus of Old English Online
An online of version of 'A Thesaurus of Old English', first published by King’s College London in 1995.
Wright's English Dialect Dictionary Online
A beta-version of Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary in electronic form.

Websites

British Association for Applied Liguistics
Membership is open to anyone with an interest in applied linguistics. Subscription required.
International Gender and Language Association
An organisation committed to the promotion and support of research on language, gender, and sexuality.
International Phonetics Association
Promotes the scientific study of phonetics and the various practical applications of that science.
Language Log
A blog that originated at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Poetics and Linguistics Association
An international academic association for those who work in stylistics, poetics, and associated fields of language and linguistics.

Linguistic corpora

Sketch Engine
Sketch Engine is a corpus query system which enables the occurences of words within large corpora of texts to be identified and the grammatical and locational uses of words to be explored. It includes a large number of corpora including the British National Corpus and the Penn Corpora of Historical English. User documentation.
Dictionary of Old English Corpus
A complete record of surviving Old English except for some variant manuscripts of individual texts. There are 3,047 texts in the corpus.
Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse
A searchable collection of Middle English texts.
Langscape
A database of Anglo-Saxon estate boundaries, with descriptions of the countryside made by the Anglo-Saxons themselves.
Corpus of Contemporary American English
Describes itself as the only large and balanced corpus of American English.
Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
A searchable collection of transcripts of academic speech events recorded at the University of Michigan.
Bookmarks for Corpus-based Linguistics
Provides links to anything and everything to do with the use of language corpora.
Corpus of Late Modern English Texts
Contains texts drawn from the Project Gutenberg and Oxford Text Archive.
Corpus of Late Modern English Prose
A corpus of informal private letters by British writers, covering the period 1861 to 1919.
The English language of the North-West in the late Modern English period: a Corpus of late 18c Prose

Other sources of linguistic data

British Newspapers 1600-1900
Drawn from the newspaper collection of the British Library.
Burney Collection
Newspapers and news pamphlets collected by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757 - 1817).
EEBO (Early English Books Online)
Facsimiles of printed material published mainly in the British Isles between 1475 and 1700.
ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online)
Digital images of 150,000 books published during the 18th Century.
Guardian/Observer Archive
Access to the Guardian from 1990 onwards and the Observer from 1994 onwards.
Nexis
A collection of international newspapers, dating from the 1980s onwards.
Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913
Contains details of trials held at London's central criminal court between 1674 and 1913.
The Times Digital Archive 1785-1985
Searchable, online facsimiles of every issue of The Times from the period.
New York Times, 1851-2008