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What does Old English mean?

Looking for the meaning or definition of the word Old English? Here's what it means.

Proper noun
  1. (linguistics) The ancestor language of Modern English, also called Anglo-Saxon, spoken in most of Britain from about 400 to 1100.
  2. (nonstandard, technically incorrect) Archaic English (Early Modern English) or Middle English speech or writing, or an imitation of this: old English.
  3. (typography, historical) The form of black letter used by 16th-century English printers.
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The dialects of Northumberland have their foundations firmly rooted in Old English Anglo-Saxon, with huge influences from Scandanavia.
The structure of Old English was more like Latin in that words had various inflectional endings to indicate their grammatical function.
In the following, italics are used for words in Swedish, while bold text indicates Old English, or Anglo-Saxon.
Old English looks much like German and looks strange to us modern English speakers.
Nonetheless, to suggest that Old English as a written language was ever quite dead and buried would be misleading.
Just read the first page or two and noted that it's much easier to read Old English once you know a bit of Dutch.

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