The Oxford History of the English Language

RICHARD W. BAILEY is Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is past president of both the American Dialect Society and the Dictionary Society of North America. His books include Images of English (1991), Nineteenth-Century English (1996), and a biography of a philological murderer, Rogue Scholar: the Sinister Career and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff (2003).

PAULA BLANK is Associate Professor of English at the College of William and Mary in Virgina. She is the author of Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (1996), and articles on the language and rhetoric of Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Jonson. She is currently working on a book on the rhetoric of ‘equality’ in the Renaissance.

MARILYN CORRIE is a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London. She is the author of a forthcoming study of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur and the editor of A Concise Companion to Middle English Literature, forthcoming from Blackwell.

DAVID CRYSTAL was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Reading for several years, and is currently Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor. His authored works are mainly in applied linguistics and English language studies, and he is editor of a series of general reference encyclopedias, first for Cambridge University Press and now for Penguin Books, along with their online incarnations.

TERRY HOAD is a Fellow of St Peter’s College, Oxford, and Tutor in English Language and Medieval Literature. He is also a lecturer in the English Faculty at Oxford University, and previously taught at Queen Mary College, London, and at the University of Arizona. His publications include the second (revised) edition (1978) of Henry Sweet’s Second AngloSaxon Reader, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1986).

SUSAN IRVINE is Professor of English Language and Literature in the Department of English at University College London. She is the author of Old English Homilies from MS Bodley 343 (1993) and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS E (2004), and co-author (with Bruce Mitchell) of Beowulf Repunctuated (2000). She has also published articles on writings of the transitional period between Old and Middle English, on rhetoric and meaning in Old English poems, and on King Alfred’s translation of Boethius’s

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