The Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday
Life in Medieval England

Some typical search procedures

The BTh is configured to carry out certain types of lexical searches, notably:

1. A search by Middle English or Anglo-Norman headword in the ‘search’ field (top right corner of the homepage).
2. A search by concept label using the ‘category’ field on the advanced search page.
3. Probing for lexemes by language of origin, using the ‘language-of-origin’ menu on the search page.

Notes

1. The search boxes support the use of wildcards (*)
2. To carry out concept-to-word searching, enter the desired concept term in the ‘category’ field. If a search for a concept in the ‘category’ field gives no results, the concept may be labelled differently. You may therefore need to navigate the category structure of the domain until you discover the appropriate category label. This is most easily done via the ‘Browse’ tab.
3. When using the language-of-origin menu, note that language choices are grouped so as to combine Middle English Dictionary etymological tags by language family, e.g. ticking ‘French and Anglo-Norman’ brings up words of French, Old French, Middle French, and Anglo-Norman origin. Likewise for the language of citation menu. To search a particular occupational domain for the language of origin of its lexis, first type the domain name (e.g. ‘farming’) in the ‘category’ field. You will see a dropdown menu in which the domain name appears and must be selected. Then press ‘search’ to obtain relevant results for that domain.