Basic structure

The DOE Corpus comprises at least one copy of each text surviving in Old English, and sometimes multiple copies if of interest for dialect, date, etc. The body of surviving Old English texts encompasses a rich diversity of records written on parchment, carved in stone and inscribed on metal. These texts fall into several categories: prose, poetry, glosses to Latin texts and inscriptions. In the prose in particular, there is a wide range of texts: saints' lives, sermons, biblical translations, penitential writings, laws, charters and wills, records (of manumissions, land grants, land sales, land surveys), chronicles, a set of tables for computing the moveable feasts of the Church calendar and for astrological calculations, medical texts, prognostics (the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the horoscope), charms (such as those for a toothache or for an easy labour), and even cryptograms.

Text types & word counts

 

Table 1. Summary of Word Count for 2009 Release.

Category

OE words

Foreign words

A: Poetry

177480

255

B: Prose

2128781

52038

C: Interlinear Glosses

699606

635655

D: Glossaries

26598

70511

E: Runic Inscriptions

346

4

F: Inscriptions in the Latin Alphabet

331

40

Total

3033142

758503

 

Summary of Word Count for 2009 Release.

Figure 1. Summary of Word Count for 2009 Release.