Joseph Bosworth (1789–1876)

"Bosworth is a treasure of Anglo-Saxon learning. there is much in him valuable, and new to me. he treads indeed in the footsteps of Dr Hickes and his followers, in endeavouring to make it a language of learned construction, giving it the genders, numbers, declensions, conjug[atio]ns, and other scaffoldings of the Greek and Latin, and encumbering it with difficulties even beyond theirs. whereas, by simplifying and fixing it's orthography, we find it is old English, only one age senior to Pierce Plowman, and that it becomes, like that, the language we speak, as readily intelligible as other old English." — Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Coolidge, 15 Jan. 1825

"we are greatly indebted to the worthies who have preserved the A[nglo]-S[axon] form, from Doctr Hickes down to mr. Bosworth. had they not given to the public what we possess through the press, that dialect would by this time have been irrecoverably lost." — Thomas Jefferson to J. Evelyn Denison, 9 Nov. 1825… (mere)

There is no other dictionary to compare with this one for being comprehensive and mostly complete in including nearly every known word in the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) language. It has been the one used by scholars for more than a century. It *is* advisable to get the 'Supplement' to this dictionary as published by Alistair Campbell via Oxford University Press. He made some valuable additions to the base dictionary.

For recent work done in expanding on this dictionary, please view the University of Toronto's Department of English webpages. They have been making significant progress in increasing our available resources for the study of Old and Middle English dialects.… (mere)