The life of Frederic Madden, in his words, 200 years after the events described. Transcribed from his journal by students @ies-sas.bsky.social. Released daily in 2026.👇 madden1826.com

Speaking as a linguist, I just feel this knock-off Labubu should be spikier, somehow...

SFX Magazine liked my book! finnlongman.com/books/the-wo...

I wrote a short blog post on the little-known Dutch scholar Cornelis Stoffel and why people like him are interesting when thinking about the history of scholarship: www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/a-f...

Make sure you book a late train home on Thursday to be able to see all three panels on Old English in the 19th Century at #IMC2026!

Chaucer in the Age of Medievalism needs you! In the wake of our conference, we are now preparing a collective volume and seeking additional chapters to complement the proceedings. Please share widely! #medievalsky modmed.hypotheses.org/8517

If you love insular manuscripts & have always wanted to visit Hereford Cathedral's chained library, 2026 is the year to come! Shaping Early Medieval Faith: The Hereford Gospels will run 30 March-12 September 2026. More details, including about the manuscript's palimpsest, coming soon.

Dictionaries 46:2 (2025) is now available (open access!) on @projectmuse.bsky.social Read here about: Arabic in China, Wittgenstein & Austrian German, etymology, Georgian learner-lexicography, antedating & linguistics pedagogy + Cambridge Handbook of the Dictionary review muse.jhu.edu/issue/55471

Cambridge Dictionary #WOTY 2025 is "parasocial" (a word my autocorrect hasn't quite got to grips with yet...): dictionary.cambridge.org/editorial/wo...

Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín (1752–1829), National Archivist of Norway and Denmark, and Professor of Antiquities at Østfold University College, translated the Old-English manuscript of Beowulf into Latin (1815).

Macquarie Dictionary has a #WotY2025 short list www.macquariedictionary.com.au/have-your-sa...

Dorothy Whitelock Lecture 2025: Guthlac: what the early medieval records tell us 3 December 17:15 St Peter’s College chapel, New Inn Hall Street, Oxford @ox.ac.uk Join the event in person or online. www.english.ox.ac.uk/event/doroth...

I'm soon going to have to start thinking about my US-to-UK and UK-to-US Words of the Year. Nominations welcome!! Here's an old blog post explaining what qualifies as a SbaCL WotY: separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2022/11/woty...

✍ Introducing ✍ Sharpie, a letterform recognition game for beginner #EarlyModern #palaeography gjhilton.github.io/Sharpie/ AKA What I Did Over Reading Week. #skystorians I’d be so grateful if you had time to share or take a look and tell me what sucks and needs fixing. Love g 🗃️

Made a site where you can practise Old English scansion. You get given a half-line and have to select which of Sievers's five types it belongs to. Just Beowulf for now, but that's 6364 half-lines to be getting on with: dgplacenames.github.io/scansion/ [Data: clasp.ell.ox.ac.uk/]

Prudence Elizabeth Frances Walter (1859–1941) is my latest #OEDMaker, and here’s a brief piece about her. Also available on Facebook to @DictionarySocNA members and at themakersoftheoed.wordpress.com/the-quotatio...

Cornelius Paine (1809–90) is my latest #OEDMaker, and here’s a piece about him. Also available on Facebook to @DictionarySocNA members and at themakersoftheoed.wordpress.com/the-quotatio...

📣 Kemble Lecture 2025 #TOEBI #medievalsky 📜‘Myths and Monsters: Beowulf and the Etymologists’ 🗣️Prof. Richard Dance, University of Cambridge 📅Thursday, 13 November 2025, 5pm 🏫Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin 💻Register for Zoom: tcd-ie.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

📣 #TOEBI #medievalsky Kemble Lecture 2025 📜‘Myths and Monsters: Beowulf and the Etymologists’ 🗣️Prof. Richard Dance, University of Cambridge 📅Thursday, 13 November 2025, 5pm 🏫Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin 💻Register for Zoom: tcd-ie.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

We're absolutely delighted to invite you to this upcoming symposium on Nineteenth-Century Medievalisms, co-organised by the New York Medieval Society and the LMS! It will take place on 18 Oct 2025. Please join through this link: us02web.zoom.us/j/8729115924... We look forward to seeing you all! 🙂

The elusive H. S. Bhide is my latest #OEDMaker, and here’s a piece about him. Also available on Facebook to @DictionarySocNA members and at themakersoftheoed.wordpress.com/miscellaneou...

In honor of National Poetry Day, the greatest parody rewrite of all time:

#OTD 342 years ago, Elizabeth Elstob (1683–1756) was born 🥳 A translator and a pioneer of Old English studies, she authored "The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue", the first Old English grammar written in English. #LinguisticBirthdays #WomenInLinguistics #Histlx

A global collection of conversations revealing how dictionaries have evolved and influenced language across twenty different traditions. Conversations on Dictionaries edited by Ilan Stavans Pre-Order today! #Linguistics #LangSky 📚 https://cup.org/4mGjF6m

Interested in letter-writing in early medieval Britain? A three-year postdoc on @francescatinti.bsky.social’s and my project is now available. Apps close on 17th Oct. Let me know if you have any questions and please circulate! 🙂 jobs.kent.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

I guess I should share this, as I'm in it. On the other hand, if you read it and don't think you'll be interested in the conversations with any of the other lexicographers in the book, then you're that much less likely to buy the book. But what the hell. lithub.com/how-to-build...

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

4-year funded PhD in Old Norse-Viking Studies at UCC, working on the Literature & Art strand of the NorseMap Project. www.ucc.ie/en/hr/vacanc...

The elephant rides again! 🐘 Join us on a journey from the palaces of Baghdad, through the streets of Córdoba and all the way to the forests of Aachen #medievalsky

A scolding usage note, from Webster's 1864. Does anyone know of such things (as an organized category of typeset notes) in an earlier dictionary? @misterslang.bsky.social @jessesword.com @jacklynch000.bsky.social

Paget Jackson Toynbee (1855–1932) is my latest #OEDMaker, and here’s a piece about him. Also available on Facebook to @DictionarySocNA members and at themakersoftheoed.wordpress.com/the-quotatio...

Stefan Fatsis on the current state of American lexicography www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

Out today!💀 (advance access, open access) my little note entitled 'Hamlet’s Garbage', Notes & Queries par excellence, and a small preview of the sorts of things that I explore in my forthcoming Textile Shakespeare: academic.oup.com/nq/article/d...

A fabulous looking new book from Tonicha Upham exploring all the Arabic and Persian evidence on Rus burials and sacrifices, complete with translations! #medievalsky #vikings www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Reasons to read/not read my new book: Pros: -You'll finally figure out what "puce" is -The phrase "cattier than a hot tin roof" is used in reference to opponent color theory -Pliny the Elder joke -Weird history & shit Cons: -Very little cussing -You might cry at this one spot? -History & shit

shoutout to tumblr user kleinergeist for this post which is going straight into my powerpoint for Grendel day in my monster class this week

Congratulations to Dr Ben Guy, who has been awarded an AHRC standard grant to fund a major collaborative project on the early Welsh charters and their boundaries! www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/news/2025/09...

Just over one week left to submit your abstracts! Come join @rafletcher.bsky.social, Dr Thijs Porck, and me at #IMC2026 talking about "Old English in the Long Nineteenth Century".

After the release of #KingAndConqueror, it seems an opportune moment to remind you that the deadline for the submission of abstracts for 'The Past, Present, and Future after Conquest: 1066, 1169' is the end of next month. #medievalsky #Normans @leverhulme.ac.uk

Call for abstracts for 20-min presentations about a dictionary collector, a dictionary collection, or dictionary collecting (or some combination of the three) at a symposium celebrating Madeline Kripke and her collection's move to Indiana University. blogs.libraries.indiana.edu/lilly/2025/0...

Join us in the DSNA! It's inexpensive for what you get, and full of people with all sorts of relationships to dictionaries. dictionarysociety.com

Great to see the hard work of my former colleagues getting recognition!

Call for Papers (deadline: 1 September, 2025): 'Old English in the Long Nineteenth Century' (IMC Leeds, 6-9 July 2026) @imc-leeds.bsky.social

Today's Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction news: A nice antedating of _terrestrial_ 'an earthling', from the first English translation of Jules Verne's _Hector Servadac_ (a.k.a. Off on a Comet) in 1877. sfdictionary.com/view/1195/te...

Archbishop Matthew Parker was born #OTD in 1504. He left the bulk of his collection to @parkerlibcccc.bsky.social but in 1574 gave us 100 books, including this new edition of the Gospels in Anglo Saxon type (1571). The notes are by Abraham Wheelock, first Cambridge Professor of Arabic. CUL 1.24.9.

CFP for @imc-leeds.bsky.social for July 2026: "Old English in the Long Nineteenth Century". Please share widely! Deadline for abstracts 1 September 2025. #IMC2026

I am the largest language model anyone could ever need I’m trained on hefty datasets that no one sane would ever read I’ll answer any question with great eloquence and attitude As long as you indulge me with a little factual latitude stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/2025/07/29/t...

A #hivemind question for anyone who knows about the @uniofeastanglia: does the university still have a James Platt Centre for Language Learning? And if not, what happened to it?

James Platt junior (1861–1910) is my latest #OEDMaker, and here’s a piece about him. Also available on Facebook to @DictionarySocNA members and at themakersoftheoed.wordpress.com/miscellaneou...

To mark the start of BBC Proms 2025, here’s my version of the Postman Pat theme tune in the style of a tango.