Form of English spoken and written between 449 and 1100 by the Anglo-Saxon invader-settlers of Britain. The morphological system of Old English including many inflectional forms. The reduction of inflections is an internal historical event that marks the development of Middle English. OED: Oxford English Dictionary Comprehensive descriptive historical dictionary of English. Entries give headword (current U.K. spelling), pronunciation (usually British Received Pronunciation) in IPA symbols, form history giving variant spellings over time (numbers=teenth century [4=fourteenth century]), considerable etymological information, senses arranged chronologically, large numbers of examples of word's use over history of English. The CD-ROM version allows word (headword only), text (the entire entire), quotation (only text in quotation examples), and etymology (only text in etymological entry) of the twenty volumes of the second edition.
Old English (Irish: Seanghaill) is a name retrospectively applied to the descendants of the settlers who came to Ireland from Wales, Normandy and England after the twelfth century conquest of the country. The name was coined in the late sixteenth century and was designed to describe the section of the above community which lived within the heart of English rule in Ireland, The Pale.
