Old English
"old-english" is a 10-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“Old English” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a proper noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 11
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - The ancestor language of Modern English, also called Anglo-Saxon, spoken in most of Britain from about 400 to 1100.
Corpus desk
Index EN-old-english · Old English · English
Old English · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 11 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "O" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | Old English |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Proper noun |
| Letters | 11 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “Old English” in English
Rare enough to double-check
Old English is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as aproper noun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 4 senses are on record.
Zero misspellings are on record for Old English in our index, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, suggesting its spelling stands apart enough that readers rarely confuse it with something else.
This entry carries no recorded etymology, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is Old English, spelled O-L-D- -E-N-G-L-I-S-H.
Definition
- 1The ancestor language of Modern English, also called Anglo-Saxon, spoken in most of Britain from about 400 to 1100.
- 2Archaic English (Early Modern English) or Middle English speech or writing, or an imitation of this: "old" English.
- 3The form of black letter used by 16th-century English printers.
- 4A historical ethnic group in Ireland descended from Norman invaders from Britain from the 12th century to the 17th century.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how Old English appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Those who claim that they've been reading Shakespeare in Old English betray their ignorance: they haven't.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.