Middle English Dictionary
Entry & Headword Lists

The following XML and HTML files are designed to facilitate linking to the online version of the Middle English Dictionary by providing lists of MED headwords paired with the ID number of the corresponding MED entry. The format of these lists keeps changing as convenience, experiment, whim, and the needs of particular users have dictated. The most recent versions are straightforward excerpts from the raw XML of the MED files themselves with only minimal alteration.

Note: Every version of these lists is based on the working copy of MED accessible to the editors. They are all therefore to some agree 'ahead' of the files available in the online MED as hosted in the Middle English Compendium. I.e., they may include entries, perhaps many entries, not yet in the online MED, or may mark some entries as 'deprecated' (flagged for eventual deletion) that are still alive and kicking in the online MED. Because they reflect current work, they are also to some degree obsolete as soon as they are created, since current efforts produce a new entry roughly every day or two.

Given an MED entry ID, a URL can always be constructed for it on this simple pattern: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/[MED id], e.g. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED7

Most recent version (October 2023)

(A new one is overdue)

• Headwords, variant spellings, and IDs. As mentioned above, this latest version is taken directly from the XML of the raw dictionary files and supplied with an abbreviated dtd and crude style sheet to allow display in most browsers (it may load slowly). Queried (dubious) entries are flagged in green, deprecated entries (those flagged for deletion) are flagged in blue; these are represented in the files as two attributes on the ENTRY element, @DUB (dubious) and @DEL (delete-worthy). Those looking at the XML coding itself will see that all the spellings are split between ORIG and REG tags. The former display, more or less as in the print dictionary. The latter are better for searching rather than human reading: they eliminate diacritics, expand parenthetical abbreviations, and otherwise yield more searchable terms. The CSS currently hides the <REG> elements.

  NOTE: this is a big file, styled with CSS. Very often, attempting to load it into a browser produces unsatisfactory results -- either it won't load, or it will not display intelligibly. We suggest right-clicking on the link (on PCS; equivalent on Macs), choosing 'save link as' in order to save the file to a local drive, and then opening the local copy in a browser. The XML file can also, of course, be opened in any decent text editor or similar application.

Previous versions

1. October 2022

• Headwords, variant spellings, and IDs. The same format as the current list, but a year older.

2. December 2021

• Headwords, variant spellings, and IDs. The same format as the current list, but two years older.

3. September 2021

• Headword list with IDs. This version is in crude HTML, formatted as a basic <dl> (dictionary list). This should display in most browsers, but can also readily be dismantled for use as input to other processes, since the MED IDs are unambiguously encoded in <CODE> tags, headwords in <B> tags, part-of-speech designations in <I> tags; the 'definition' half of the list (<dd>), readily removable, contains a bare list of alternative spellings, from the 'alsos' lists displayed in the dictionary. Non-keyboard characters are encoded as numeric character references.

  Note: this list includes 88 entries that have been flagged for deletion ("deprecated" in computer parlance); those displayed for the first time in red (and encoded with <span style="color:red">)

4. September 2020

• Headwords (including diacritics) and IDs. (HTML, no variant spellings, diacritics expressed as numeric entities)

5. December 2017

The following list represents a snapshot of the eMED after initial editorial revision undertaken under the NEH-funded MED renovation project.

• This list (XML, 2017) updates the 2007 'headwords and IDs' list below, but includes many new entries. New entries are marked by IDs containing decimal points. No variant spellings.

6. August 2007.

This is the eMED as current from roughly 2000 through 2016, substantially identical to the print Dictionary, though with many low-level improvements, especially to MS shelfmarks and dates.

• Lemmata only (XML) contains simply the lemmata, or headwords, with diacritics suppressed, combined with their IDs.
• Variant forms (XML) contains the full form sections, including variant spellings and all diacritics, again combined with their IDs.

Both files are in simple XML, with a declared doctype pointing to a simple dtd (medhed.dtd), and invoke a very simple stylesheet (medheds.css) which should allow them to be displayed in most modern browsers [but tested only in Firefox], or downloaded and processed further.