Old English Guides

The Old English alphabet looks familiar until a word contains þ , ð , æ , or ƿ . Those four characters belonged to a writing system based mainly on the Latin alphabet, adapted for the language spoken and written in early medieval England. Anglo-Saxon scribes also used letter shapes and abbreviations that a modern printed edition may quietly replace.

Old English is the earliest recorded form of the English language. It was used in early medieval England long before the English of Chaucer or Shakespeare, and its surviving writing can look unfamiliar even to someone who speaks Modern English fluently. Consider hūs , which resembles house , beside scylun , a word that most readers would not recognize without help. Both belong to the history of English.