The Wordhord is indeed a treasure trove of old English words, written with deep affection and expertise by Hana Videen.
If you speak a Scandinavian or Germanic language, you will be delighted to meet many older cousins of English words here. For instance, I knew that a dead body was a Leiche in German. But I hadn’t made the connection to lych and thus the lychgate to the churchyard, where the coffin rested before coming in. Or that an acorn is an āc’s, or oak’s, seed, or corn. The book is crammed with aha moments like that.
As Videen says herself, she has not so much written a primer as a family album: “Old English words are familiar but also strange, like seeing pictures of your parents as children.” Or indeed, your nth-great grandparents. You might have heard of the great vowel shift, but perhaps not of the letter swap by which hwēol became whēl (wheel). Or the wine-whine merger, by which those hyphenated words became homophones in many Englishes (but not in Scotland or the southeast US).
A delightful aspect of the book is how it brings you closer to the people behind the words. You would know that people wrote with feathers. But had you thought that
left-handed people would prefer a feather from a bird’s right wing, because it’s slanted the other way? You might know that leech is a word for doctor, but not what kind of remedies people used to treat illnesses – with much more than bloodsuckers.
Each chapter ends with a list of words introduced in it, and their meanings, like this:
They say you need to use a word six times to learn it. So the next thing would be to start using these in your writing.
When I turned the final page, I was braced to feel bereft, or at least catapulted forward a millennium and more. But all was not lost, as I now have the app on my phone and can get an old English word every day. And Santa knows that I covet the Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary.
Ridge Writing Retreats 
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