The Thesaurus, offered as a research tool to Anglo-Saxonists, linguists, and all historians of ideas and culture, is drawn from a database of more than 50,000 entries, each recording a discrete word sense of Old English vocabulary. These materials are drawn largely from the standard dictionaries of the language, with some supplementation from the available fascicles of the Toronto Dictionary of Old English, and from the DOE's working materials.

The Thesaurus classification is based on that designed by Michael Samuels and Christian Kay for the Historical Thesaurus of English, for which the TOE may be regarded as a pilot. An updated electronic version is now available online.
We are grateful to the British Academy for funding this project under grant LRG - 37362.