Middle English Dictionary Citation Slips, 1860-2001

Summary

Creator:

Middle English dictionary.

Abstract:

The Middle English Dictionary, a comprehensive dictionary of the English language as it was used between 1100 and 1500, was in production at the University of Michigan from 1930 to 2001. Collection contains 3 million citation slips used in compiling the Middle English Dictionary, including citations donated by Oxford English Dictionary and Cornell University in addition to those generated by systematic reading of Medieval English texts and manuscripts. Citations include vocabulary words along with context and notes concerning sources.

Extent:

582 linear feet (in 1164 boxes)

Language:

English

Call Number:

0183 Bimu 2

Authors:

Finding aid created by Bentley Library Staff, 2001, 2010

Background

Scope and Content:

The Middle English Dictionary (MED) citation slips, over three million individual slips of paper, represent the raw material used in the compilation of the MED. The citations include the original slips donated by the Oxford English Dictionary and Cornell University as well as those generated through the MED project's reading program. Some 200 readers pored through Middle English texts, including Bibles, letters, diaries and legal documents. Scientific texts were also read in order to capture a technical vocabulary not appearing in literary texts. Words gleaned from these readings of Middle English texts were copied by MED staff, along with the context (a phrase or a sentence or two), onto slips of paper along with notes concerning the source of the citation. Each citation typically consists of a line or two copied onto a slip, or sometimes a whole paragraph or stanza cut from a copy of a book. The slips contain short titles assigned to the individual texts by the MED; these short titles may be found in the Middle English Dictionary Plan and Bibliography (1954), Plan and Bibliography Supplement I (1984), and the comprehensive 2nd edition of the Plan and Bibliography (2007).

The citation slips are organized alphabetically by headword. Originally the citation slips were stored at the MED facilities in some 900 boxes each 16 inches long and 8 1/2 inches wide. Each of the boxes could hold up to 4,000 slips. In 2001, prior to transfer to the Bentley Historical Library, the slips were reboxed maintaining their original order into archival storage containers. The archival boxes, smaller in length, expanded the box count for the citations slips to 1,137 boxes. An archival box normally contains a number of entries separated by cardboard guidecards, but occasionally, in the case of commonly used words, may contain only one.

In each entry the organization of materials is as follows (with slight variations--the order becomes more fixed as the alphabet goes on): (a) the copy used in the printed MED, with definitions written on yellow slips (with senses and subsenses indicated by numbers and letters where appropriate), followed by the citation slips in chronological order illustrating each sense and subsense; (b) spelling and form lists on pink slips, plus cut-up's from the OED entry as well as those in other dictionaries, along with the editor's and other notes; miscellaneous rejected citation slips preceded by a pink slip (usually those that are too late or too early, that are from other languages, or that cross senses); (d) rejected citation slips by sense and subsense, in chronological order, each preceded by a pink slip; (e) duplicate citation slips from the OED, preceded by a single pink slip.

The following inventory gives the beginning and ending headwords for each of the 1,137 boxes of citation slips. Abbreviations in the inventory are: adj.= adjective; adv.= adverb; art.= article; conj.= conjunction; cont.= continued; def.= definite; ger.= gerund; interj.= interjection; n.= noun; pl.= plural; poss.= possessive; pref.= prefix; prep.= preposition; pron.= pronoun; rel.= relative; suf.= suffix; sup.= superlative; v.= verb. Also, three Middle English characters are used in the headwords: æ, alphabetized as a + e; 3 (lower case), alphabetized between g and h; þ and ð, alphabetized as t + h.

The supplement slips were stored at the MED facilities in the same kind of boxes as the original citation slips, but were reboxed during the summer of 2001 into the smaller archival boxes, expanding the original box count of 18 to 27. The supplement boxes contain primarily supplementary quotations for already existing entries or quotations for new entries; in only a limited number of cases are there full-fledged edited entries like those in the printed MED or in the electronic MED.

NOTE: The contest list has been broken by letters to aid in navigation. Since boxes do not always break on a new letter, some words at the beginning of each letter may be in the previous box.

Biographical / Historical:

Over seventy years in the making, the Middle English Dictionary (MED) has been described as "the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America." The MED is a comprehensive dictionary of the English language as it was used between 1100 and 1500, roughly from the Norman Conquest to the introduction of the printing press. Conceived along the lines of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the MED project was undertaken in order to provide a comparable dictionary for the Middle English period.

The MED project began in earnest in 1930 when the University of Michigan received donations from the Oxford English Dictionary and Cornell University of their collections of Middle English citation slips. Michigan was selected as the locus of the MED due to the work then underway by Professor Charles C. Fries in developing an Early Modern English Dictionary covering the period 1500-1675. The early years of the MED (1930--1945) were devoted primarily to a reading program in which quotations supplementing the original donations were extracted from a wide variety of Middle English texts, including Bibles, letters, diaries and legal documents. Scientific treatises in astronomy, botany, mathematics, alchemy and medicine also were read in order to include a technical vocabulary not appearing in literary texts. Some 200 readers pored through these materials, making citations on slips of paper. Words gleaned from readings of Medieval English texts were copied by MED staff, along with the context (a phrase or a sentence or two), onto slips of paper along with notes concerning the source of the citation. Three million such slips comprise the raw material for the MED.

The initial reading-program phase was largely complete by 1945, enabling compilation of a bibliography to move forward. The bibliographic phase entailed selecting the preferred manuscript or edition for each work cited, dating manuscripts, determining dates of composition, and styling the abbreviated references for clarity and conciseness. The MED project received much support and assistance with this task from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and the Cambridge University Library.

Editing began in earnest in 1946, and the editors usually made use of "sorting boards," tiered wooden devices with slots that allowed the slips to be arranged in various groupings. Once sorted, the slips ultimately found their way into the MED as supporting quotations in word entries, which vary from a few lines for rare words to one hundred columns for key verbs. Dictionary entries written by MED editors were reviewed in detail by the editor-in-chief or the review editors.

Publication began in 1952 with the letter E, and over the long history of the project, the system of producing final copy changed from a typewriter-generated system to a computer-assisted system, with a corresponding increase in the frequency with which the published parts (called "fascicles") appeared. From the mid 1980s until the conclusion of the project, entries were entered in the computer by the MED production staff, then reviewed and proofread several more times before being made up into double-column pages for photolithographic printing. There are 115 fascicles in the MED proper.

Reading, sorting, editing, reviewing, keyboarding, proofing and printing resulted in a dictionary of 13 volumes containing nearly 15,000 pages, over 54,000 separate entries and nearly 900,000 illustrative quotations from both the technical and specialized vocabularies of the period and the more general and literary ones.

In the project's final decades the MED operated under the auspices of the University of Michigan Office of the Vice President for Research with input from the governing body of faculty and administrators called the MED Council. The project was directed by an editor-in-chief/executive director, who was assisted in scholarly matters by review editors and in administrative matters by an internal advisory committee. Other professional staff members included specialists in medieval languages and Middle English. A production staff was responsible for the prepublication aspects of the project.

The bulk of the funding for the project came from the University of Michigan with the exception of two significant series of grants. Between 1975 and 1980, the primary support for the editing came from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and between 1980 and 1997, funding came from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The MED had an annual operating budget of approximately $330,000 which was supported primarily by the University's General Fund and supplemented by contributions from individuals and institutions from a fund-raising campaign.

The first grant from the Mellon Foundation enabled the staff to expand and move to new quarters from the fifth floor of Angell Hall, which the project had occupied since 1930. In 1975, with the expanded staff, the project was moved off campus to a commercial building located at 555 South Forest, where it remained until the conclusion of the project.

Preparation of an electronic version of the MED began in 1997 under the direction of John Price-Wilkin and Frances McSparran. The electronic MED is one of three resources comprising the Middle English Compendium. In addition to the MED, the compendium includes the Hyperbibliography of Middle English Prose and Verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. This resource is available at the following URL: http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/mec/

From the early years of publication a print supplement was part of the long-range plan. The files for it began to be organized during Sherman Kuhn's editorship, and between then and 2001 they were systematically added to, with the result that by the end of the project there were eighteen boxes of alphabetized supplementary materials. Public references to a supplement began to appear by 1961, and in the printed fascicles from R through Z cross-references were inserted to "Suppl." entries.

Unfortunately, the cost of producing a supplement was beyond the university's means but some preliminary work was done during the summer of 2001, through a grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research awarded to Frances McSparran, when four members of the MED Production Staff organized and classified the supplementary materials, partially entered the additional quotations into the computer, and proofed them against the texts. From the fall of 2001 until early 2010 the full supplement files were housed in the Buhr Storage Facility, under the supervision of the Special Collections Library, but were transferred to the Bentley Library in February 2010 and are now available for consultation.

Date	Event
1930-1934	Samuel Moore
1935-1945	Thomas A. Knott
1946-1961	Hans Kurath
1961-1983	Sherman M. Kuhn
1982-2001	Robert E. Lewis

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Pow, Terry, "A World in a Shoe Box," Ann Arbor Observer, Vol. 25, no. 8; April 2001, pp. 45-47

"Long Awaited Middle English Dictionary is Definitive Resource," University Record, Vol. 56, no. 30; April 23, 2001, p. 8

"A Worlde of Wordes: Dictionaries and the Rise of the Middle English Lexicography," brochure accompanying exhibit in the Special Collections Library curated by Frances McSparran and Robert E. Lewis, May-August 2001.

Lewis, Robert E., "History of the Middle English Dictionary Project," Middle English Dictionary Plan and Bibliography, 2nd edition, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Acquisition Information:

The citation slips were transferred to the Bentley Library in August 2001 (donor number 9126 ). Supplement slips were transferred to the Bentley Library in February 2010 9126

Accruals:

No further additions to the records are expected.

Physical Location:

Portions located in offsite storage; prior notification required for access.

Rules or Conventions:

Finding aid prepared using Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS)

Subjects

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Subjects:

Middle English dictionary.
English language -- Middle English, 1100-1500 -- Dictionaries.