In March the NEH announced $21.1 million in grants for 248 humanities projects, but this is the only money being given to an institution in Canada. Operating out of the University of Toronto, the Dictionary of Old English began about 35 years ago to provide a standard reference work for scholars of the language.
The project has now completed two-thirds of the words, and this year will be publishing the entries beginning with the letter H, one of the most important in the language. Members of the project team have been working on this letter for seven years, since there are about 3,000 words beginning with H.
Besides offering invaluable information to scholars of Old English, the project has been extremely useful to understanding the history of the English language. The Dictionary of Old English also works with the Middle English Dictionary as well as the Oxford English Dictionary.
Dictionary of Old English gets $160,000 in funding
The Dictionary of Old English, a project aimed at collecting and defining all the words from Old English texts written between the years 600 and 1150, has received $160,000 in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) earlier this spring, enough money to keep the project going for two years.