The DOE Web Corpus is a database consisting of at least one copy of each text surviving in Old English. It represents over three million words of Old English and just under a million words of Latin, or almost five times the collected works of Shakespeare!

The body of surviving Old English texts encompasses a rich diversity of records written on parchment, carved in stone and inscribed in jewelry. These texts include prose, poetry, glosses to Latin texts and inscriptions. In the prose in particular, there is a wide range of texts: saints’ lives, sermons, biblical translations, penitential writings, laws, charters and wills, records (of manumissions, land grants, land sales, land surveys), chronicles, a set of tables for computing the moveable feasts of the Church calendar and for astrological calculations, medical texts, prognostics (the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the horoscope), charms (such as those for a toothache or an easy labour), and even cryptograms.

The DOE Web Corpus is an essential reference tool for scholars of Old and Middle English. Enjoy exploring it at your leisure!