Some Comparison of A Thesaurus of Old English and Clark Hall's A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, One of Its Three Source Dictionaries

The aim of this paper is to compare entry words and their word senses in A Thesaurus of Old English [TOE] with those in Clark Hall's A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary 4th edition [CHI, one of the three "standard Old English dictionaries" as TOE states (see footnote 6, p. xvi "Introduction").CH is an alphabetical-order dictionary, while TOE is a conceptually arranged one.My attempt here, however, is justified because TOE is "largely dependent upon the definitions to be found in the Bosworth-Toller and Clark Hall dictionaries" (p.xvi). 1 The comparison will go along with the Bosworth-Toller and Cambell (for convenience Bosworth-Toller and Tollers' Supplement is hereafter referred to as BTS, and Cambell's Enlarged and Corrigenda as Camb).1.2 The number of entry words in CH Clark Hall's 3rd edition has 37,823 entry words (hereafter CH's main body or the main body), which Meritt supplements with 1,705 words including 680 that refer to CH's main body.The result is the present CH 4th edition that gives us 39,838 entry words.22.1 TOE and Meritt's use of "Delete" in his supplement Meritt gives the instruction, "Delete," to 221 entry words in the main body.TOE partly goes against this by retaining 19 words in its entry words (n.b.Meritt provides five of them with a "?" mark) .Since eight of them are given flags o, or g, and the rest flag q ("questionable" or "dubious"), TOE's retention seems to be justified by its intention as is shown by the words as follows.