catfish

7 April 2025

Photo of a fish with four pair of prominent barbels (“whiskers”)

A channel catfish, Ictalurus punctatus

Catfish are a diverse group of fishes of the orders Siluriformes or Nematognathi, so named because many, but not all, of catfish species have distinctive barbels (a type of sensory organ) that resemble a cat’s whiskers. Catfish can be found mainly in fresh and brackish water on six continents. (They don’t inhabit Antarctica.) Most catfish species are bottom feeders. Many catfish species are important food sources, and they can be easy and inexpensive to farm.

The name catfish dates to at least 1612, when John Smith records it in his description of the colony of Virginia:

Of fish we were best acquainted with Sturgeon, Grampus, Porpus, Seales, Stingraies, whose tailes are very dangerous. Brettes, mullets, white Salmonds, Trowts, Soles, Plaice, Herrings, Conyfish, Rockfish, Eeles, Lampreyes, Catfish, Shades, Pearch of 3 sorts, Crabs, Shrimps, Creuises, Oysters, Cocles and Muscles.

But catfish acquired a slang sense in 2010 meaning a person who uses a false online persona to deceive, especially in an online relationship. The slang term comes from the 2010 documentary film Catfish, which follows a man, Nev Schulman, who engages in an online relationship with a woman, Megan. It turns out that Megan does not exist, and her online persona was created by another woman, Angela. In the film, Angela’s husband, Vince, describes his wife as a catfish, because purveyors of live cod supposedly included a catfish in the tank to keep the cod lively and active during shipment. (Accounts of this supposed practice date to 1912.) From a transcript of the film:

The catfish will keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life, and they keep you on your toes. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh.

The film was shown at the Sundance film festival in January 2010 and entered into wider distribution by that September. But Urbandictionary.com had a post of the slang sense dated 22 July 2010. (The post is no longer on the site but is documented by the Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang). A post to Urbandictionary.com of 2 September 2010 reads:

catfish

someone who pretends to be someone they are not online to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.

From the 2010 movie Catfish

Many guys have multiple accounts on facebook because they are catfishes

Urbandictionary.com also has entries from the early 2000s that use the term for various types of male pick-up artists, relying on a metaphor of catfish as bottom feeders. If these senses had wider currency, they may have influenced the adoption and spread of the online deceiver sense, although the 2010 film is clearly the primary locus of origin.

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Sources:

Dexxe, Urbandictionary.com, 2 September 2010.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. catfish, n.

Joost, Henry and Ariel Schulman, dir. Catfish (film), Universal Pictures, 2010. IMDB.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989 & additional sense, 2023, catfish, n.; third edition, December 2023, catfish, v., catfishing, n.

Smith, John. A Map of Virginia with a Description of Covntrey, the Commodities, People, Government and Religion. Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1612, 15. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Photo credit: US Army Corps of Engineers, before 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

urban / suburbs / suburbia / burbs

Photo of rows of semi-detached houses separated by green lawns

Suburban housing development, Spennymoor, Durham, UK, 2015

5 April 2025

The root of all these words is the Latin noun urbs, meaning city, and specifically the city of Rome. From this noun comes the adjective urbanus. And there is the Latin adjective suburbanus, referring to the environs surrounding a city. In Latin, the word’s development followed the usual path, root then root plus affixes.

But in English, we first see the form suburbs. It first appears in a c. 1350 translation of the Deuteronomy 32:32 in the Midland Prose Psalter:

For our God nis nouȝt as her goddes, and our enemis ben iuges. Her uines is of þe uine of Sode-mens & of þe suburbes of Gomorre. Her grape is grape of gall, & her berye hys bitterest.

(For our God is not as their gods, and our enemies are judges. Her vines are the vine of Sodom & of the suburbs of Gomorrah. Their grapes are the grapes of gall, and their berries are the bitterest.)

The Latin Vulgate of this verse uses suburbanis.

This wasn’t the suburbs as we know them today, a ring of residential land surrounding a city. Rather the Latin and fourteenth-century translation of Deuteronomy use the word to mean the agricultural lands surrounding a city.

A few decades later, we seen suburbs used to refer to residential areas outside of a city, but these are not the affluent homesteads which we’re familiar with today. Rather these are shanty towns and low areas populated by the poor and the criminal. Here’s a passage from Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue, c. 1387, where the Canon’s Yeoman describes where he and his con-man boss reside:

“Ther-of no fors, good Yeman,” quod oure Hoost;
“Syn of the konnyng of thy lord thow woost,
Telle how he dooth, I pray thee hertely,
Syn that he is so crafty and so sly.
Where dwelle ye, if it to telle be?”
“In the suburbes of a toun,” quod he,
“Lurkynge in hernes and in lanes blynde,
Whereas thise robbours and thise theves by kynde
Holden hir pryvee fereful residence,
As they that dar nat shewen hir presence;
So faren we, if I shal seye the sothe.”

(“That does not matter, good Yeoman,” said our host.
“Since you know the cunning of your lord,
Tell how he does, I ask you heartily,
Since he is so crafty and so sly.
Where do you dwell, if it can be told?”

“In the suburbs of a town,” he said,
“Lurking in corners and blind lanes,
Where these robbers and these thieves by nature
Hold their private, fearful residence,
As those who dare not show their presence;
So we conduct ourselves, if I shall tell the truth.”)

The disreputable nature of suburbs would continue into the seventeenth century. It is only in the eighteenth do such regions start to be rehabilitated.

Urban doesn’t make its English appearance until over two hundred years later, in Alexander Garden’s 1619 verse life of William Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen (1431–1514):

And suche viuacitie of spreit,
Was he indew'd withall.
That nothing laicking feem’d
That needs concerne, or can
Be fitting for ane priuat, or
A publick placed man.
Vrban and tunishe turns,
Or for the land's effairs,
Or what soeu'r besyd, his wit
Him fit for all declairs.

Note that Garden is associating the city with things that are fashionable (tunishe or tonish), a connotation that continues to this day.

There are further variations on the words. We get the faux-Latin suburbia in the late nineteenth century. Here is an example from a theater review that appears in the London newspaper the Era on 9 October 1870:

A new farce by Mr. Conway Edwardes, entitled Board and Residences, commenced the entertainments. It is a light and bustling affair enough. Miss Matilda Mildew, a spinster of middle age, keeps a boarding-house in Tranquil-terrace, Suburbia.

And the American slangish clipping the burbs is in place by 1977. From an article on urban farming in the Washington Post of 11 December of that year:

Regardless, for most homesteaders, there must be another source of income, and that requires, in the vast majority of cases, close proximity to an urban environment. Some, like General Motors heir Stewart Mott, for several years a chicken-farmer on his Manhattan rooftop, have found ways of adding a rural flavor to an essentially urban existence. Others are buying the American dream of a house in the burbs and two cars in the garage—and then adding a new dimension.


Sources:

Bülbring, Karl D., ed. The Earliest Complete English Prose Psalter, part 1. Early English Text Society. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891, 188. London, British Library, MS Additional 17376. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Cook, Adrienne. “The Urban: Farmstead.” Washington Post, 11 December 1977, Magazine 25/2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Garden, Alexander. The Lyf, Doings, and Deathe of The Right Reuerend and Worthy Prelat, William Elphinstoun (1619). In A Theatre of Scottish Worthies. Glasgow: R. Anderson, 1878, 71. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 8 February 2025, s.v. suburban, n., suburb(e, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. ‘burb, n.; June 2012, s.v. suburban, n. & adj., suburb, n., suburbia, n.; June 2011, s.v. urban, adj. & n.

“Town Edition.” Era (London), 9 October 1870, 13/1. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

Image credit: Trevor Littlewood, 2015. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

yard

A house and green lawn; a car is parked in the driveway and a van in the garage

A typical suburban, American front yard, c. 1983

4 April 2025

In Present-Day English, yard has several meanings, but the two dominant ones are an open area near a house or other building and a unit of linear measure. But while spelled and pronounced the same, these are two separate words, descending from different Old English roots.

The first, the open area near a building, comes from the Old English geard, meaning a home, dwelling place, or enclosure. And it is from this enclosure sense that the present-day meaning comes down to us. We see this sense in the poem Beowulf, in a passage in which an old man mourns the death of his son:

Gesyhð sorhcearig    on his sune bure
winsele westne,    windge reste,
reot[g]e berofene;    ridend swefað,
hæleð in hoðman;    nis þær hearpan sweg,
gomen in geardum,    swylce ðær iu wæron.

(He will look sadly at his son’s chamber, the desolate wine-hall, the windswept rest, mournful, empty; the riders sleep, heroes in the grave; there is no harp song, no entertainments in the yard, such as there once was.)

And we see it used in the sense of home, rather figuratively to refer to heaven, in the poem Guthlac A:

Swa soð-fæstra    sawla motun
in ecne geard    up gestigan
rodera rice,    þa þe ræfnað her
wordum ond weorcum    wuldor-cyninges
lare longsume,    on hyra lifes tid
earniað on eorðan    ecan lifes,
hames in heahþu.

(So may the souls of the righteous ascend to the eternal yard, the kingdom of heaven; those who perform here in words and deeds the longtime teaching of the king of glory in their lifetimes on earth earn eternal life, homes on high.)

The unit of measurement, on the other hand, comes from the Old English gyrd, meaning a tree branch, rod, or staff. We see this rod sense in the Old English translation of Exodus 8:16:

Drihten cwæð to Moyse: Cweð to Aarone: Ahefe þine gyrde & sleah on eorðan, þæt gnættas gewurðon ofer eal Egypta land.

(The Lord said to Moses: Say to Aaron, “raise your yard & strike the earth, so that gnats settle over all the land of Egypt.)

And gyrd as the unit of measurement can be seen in a charter that outlines the rents due at Hurstbourne Priors, Hampshire:

Her synd gewriten þa gerihta þæ ða ceorlas sculan don to Hyssebyrnan. Ærest æt hilcan hiwisce feorwerti penega to herfestes emnihte […] & XVI. gyrda gauoltininga eac.

(Here are written the dues the peasants must render at Hurstbourne. First, from each hide fourteen pence at the autumnal equinox […] & also 16 yards of fencing.)

This Old English yard was not equivalent to our present-day measurement, being around sixteen feet long—the modern measure known as a rod is sixteen and a half feet. So a more accurate present-day translation of the above would read “16 rods of fencing.” The yard was reduced and standardized at three feet in the fourteenth century.

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Sources:

Crawford, S. J., ed. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch. Early English Text Society, O. S. 160. London: Oxford UP, 1922, Exodus 8:16, 232. Archive.org.

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. geard, n., gyrd, n.

Fulk, R. D. Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. Klaeber’s Beowulf, fourth edition. Toronto: Toronto UP, 2008, lines 2455–59, 84.

Guthlac A. In Mary Clayton, ed. Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 27. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013, lines 790–96a, 142.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. yard, n.1, yard, n.2.

“Services and Dues Rendered at Hurstbourne Priors, Hampshire.” In A. J. Robertson, ed. Anglo-Saxon Charters, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1959, 206.

Image credit: Bart Everson, c. 1983. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

weapon of mass destruction / WMD /conventional weapon

The symbols for radiological and biological hazards and a skull and crossbones superimposed over a world map

2 April 2025

Most people became aware of the terms weapon of mass destruction and WMD during the run up to the first Gulf War in 1990–91. And they again entered the public consciousness during the second war with Iraq which started twelve years later. Both times Saddam Hussein had been thought to have developed nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, an assessment that was only correct the first time. But the term is much older than widespread public awareness of it.

The term weapon of mass destruction dates to at least 27 December 1937, when it was used by William Cosmo Gordon Lang, the archbishop of Canterbury in a speech. He uttered the phrase in the context of the bombing of cities in Spain and China by fascist air forces. Lang was using the term not in the sense of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, but rather conventional weapons that were used indiscriminately against civilians:

Who can think without horror of what another widespread war would mean, waged as it would be with all the new weapons of mass destruction? Yet how fruitless seem to be all efforts to secure a really settled peace.

The abbreviation WMD dates to at least 1985, when it appears in a master’s thesis on the Outer Space Treaty of 1966. Again, the definition here is an expansive one:

Taking into account the circumstances under which the Space Treaty was concluded, it would be difficult to view Article IV a derogation of the common interest principle. Aside from Article IV(2) which totally demilitarize [sic] the moon and other celestial bodies, the ban under Article IV (1) on the “weapon of mass destruction” (WMD) is noteworthy. The concept of WMD is not a static one. It not only embraces weapons of this kind which had existed before the conclusion of the Space Treaty, such as chemical and biological weapons; but also encompasses weapons of mass destruction to be developed in future. In judging whether a particular weapon is WMD, it is the effect and destructiveness caused by this weapon that should count, not the question of whether a weapon is conventional or non-conventional. Moreover, the means by which mass destruction can be caused is only secondary. The direct killing is equal to killing by destroying crops, by flooding large living areas, or by any other kind of modification of our natural environment.

Article IV of that 1966 treaty reads:

States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station weapons in outer space in any other manner.

The Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manœuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the Moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited.

The counterparts to WMD are conventional weapons. That retronym, used in contrast to nuclear weapons, appears, as one might expect, shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is this from Illinois’s Centralia Evening Sentinel of 16 October 1945:

The general’s [i.e., Lt. Gen. Curtis LeMay’s] plain speaking is welcome at a time when the whole country has been understandably confused about the whole subject of atomic power. There has been a tendency to assume that there was no possible defense against the bomb, and that aircraft and other conventional weapons have been ruled out.

And there is this from Ohio’s Cincinnati Post of 4 July 1946, shortly after the first atomic tests on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific:

There is no tendency on the part of anybody here to question that the plutonium bomb is a vastly more dangerous weapon in the hands of any enemy than any conventional weapon ever conceived.

A note on usage. When I was working arms control issues in the Pentagon in the early 1990s, we actively tried to discourage use of the terms weapons of mass destruction and WMD. Our thinking was that nuclear weapons were orders of magnitude more destructive than even biological or chemical weapons, and that putting them in the same category was committing an analytical error and would lead to poor policy outcomes. We were not successful in quashing use of the terms.

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Sources:

Heath, S. Burton. “Bikini Atomic Bomb Blast Pleases Navy.” Cincinnati Post (Ohio), 4 July 1946, 16/4–5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Huang, Jiefang. The Common Interest Principle in Space Law (LL.M thesis). Institute of Air and Space Law, McGill University, June 1985, 196–97. ProQuest Dissertations.

“In the Arm Chair.” Centralia Evening Sentinel (Illinois), 16 October 1945, 8/1. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, 2005, s.v. weapon of mass destruction, n., WMD, n.

“Primate Appeals to the Individual in His Home.” Scotsman (Edinburgh), 27 December 1937, 15/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (1966). United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

Image credit: Fastfission, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

viking

B&W photo of a cat in a winged viking helmet and scale-mail breastplate, with the caption “Brünnhilde"

28 March 2025

We all have a solid idea of what a viking was, one of a band of a horned-helmeted, Old Norse warriors who ravaged northern Europe in the medieval period. And that idea is wrong. Not only did viking helmets not have horns, the Norse people who sailed about the northern world were more likely to be peaceful merchants and traders than plundering raiders and pirates. Viking was an occupation, and an occasional gig at that, not an ethnic identity. Furthermore, the word viking is really three different, albeit etymologically related, words. There is the Old English wicing, the Old Norse vikingr, and our Present-Day English word viking. Each of these has slightly different meanings and very different histories.

The Old English wicing is formed through normal derivation, wic (camp) + -ing (person). So a wicing is a person who establishes a camp, much like a pirate might on a shore they were raiding. Wicing appears in the Épinal and Erfurt glossaries, two Latin-Old English word lists. The entriy in the Épinal glossary, which dates to the first half of the eighth century, reads:

piraticum    uuicingsceadan

And the Erfurt glossary, from the late eighth or early ninth century, reads:

piraticam    uuicingsceadae

The Latin piraticum means piracy, and the Old English wicingsceada literally means viking-like. Note that the Épinal glossary predates the period of Norse raids on the English coastline that started toward the end of the eighth century. The late ninth century translation of Orosius’s history also uses wicing, but that use is in the context of Philip of Macedon (the father of Alexander the Great) raiding in the Mediterranean:

Philippuse geþuhte æfter þæm þæt he an land ne mihte þæm folce mid gifum gecweman þe him an simbel wæron mid winnende; ac he scipa gegaderode, & wicingas wurdon, & sona æt anum cirre an C & eahtatig ceapscipa gefengon.

(Philip realized that on land he could not satisfy with gifts the people who had continually been fighting alongside him, so he gathered ships and went viking, and soon captured one hundred eighty merchant ships in one engagement.)

Similarly, in the Old English poem Exodus, a poetic retelling of some chapters of that biblical book, the Israelites making the Red Sea crossing are referred to as sæwicingas, or sea-vikings:

Æfter þære fyrde    flota modgade,
Rubenes sunu.    Randas bæron
sæ-wicingas    ofer sealtne mersc,
mana menio;    micel an-getrum
eode unforht.

(After that army the sea-force, the sons of Reuben, proudly marched. The sea-vikings, many a man, bore shields across the salt marsh. The great host went unafraid.)

As is the case with most Old English poetry, we don’t know when it was composed. But note that the term sea-vikings is being used to describe a land army, presumably because they are crossing the Red Sea. Depending on when the poem was written, it could also be an allusion to Norse raiders, but that would be a strange association for an English poet to make about the Israelites.

Indeed, wicing was used more generally to mean any plunderer. For instance, Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (Sermon of the Wolf to the English), written c. 1015, uses the word to refer to an enslaved person who has escaped and become an outlaw, in a passage condemning unjust laws:

Ðeah þræla hwilc hlaforde ætleape & of cristendome to wicinge wurþe, & hit æfter þam eft gewurþe þæt wæpengewrixl wurðe gemæne þegne & þræle, gif þræl þone þæne þegen fullice afylle, licge ægilde ealre his mægðe; and gif se þegen þone þræl þe he ær ahte fullice afylle, gilde þegengilde.

(Though a slave who escapes from their lord and from Christendom to become a viking, and afterward it happens that an exchange of weapons occurs between thane and slave, if the slave should outright kill that thane, [the thane] will lie without any compensation to his family; but if the thane kills outright that slave that he had once owned, he pays the price for killing a thane.)

Although here, unlike the Exodus poem, Wulfstan is undoubtedly also alluding to Norse raiders. Sermo Lupi ad Anglos is about how the decadent English society is being punished by God, and one of those punishments is viking raids.

In his grammar, written at the end of the tenth century, about two decades before Wulfstan’s sermon, Ælfric of Eynsham also deploys the word generally, but his use probably carries an allusion to Norse raiders as well. His gloss on the Latin pirata reads:

pirata wicing oððe scegðman

(pirate: viking or shipman)

Scegð being a type of fast sailing ship used by the Scandinavians.

There is an instance in Old English poetry where wicing is used as the name of a people, that is in the poem Widsith, which consists mainly of a long list of various peoples. One passage reads thusly:

Hroþwulf ond Hroðgar    heoldon lengest
sibbe ætsomne    suhtor-fædran,
siþþan hy forwræcon    wicinga cynn
ond Ingeldes    ord forbigdan,
forheowan æt Heorote    Heaðobeardna þrym.

(Hrothwulf and Hrothgar, uncle and nephew, together held the peace the longest, since they drove away the nation of vikings and humiliated the vanguard of Ingeld, cut down the Heathobard host at Heorot.)

The people and events in the passage are also referred to in the poem Beowulf. Exactly who the wicinga cynn were is not known, but since Hrothwulf and Hrothgar were Danes, it is unlikely that they refer to a Norse people. They may be a distinct group, or the phrase may be another name for Ingeld’s people, the Heathobards. Again, we don’t know exactly who the Heathobards were either, but they perhaps came from Saxony, or perhaps they were entirely fictional.

And in the poem the Battle of Maldon, written sometime after 991 C.E., wicing is used to refer to a Norse army invading England:

Þa stod on stæðe,    stiðlice clypode
wicinga ar,    wordum mælde,
se on beot abead    brimliþendra
ærænde to þam eorle,    þær he on ofre stod.

(Then stood on the shore, a viking messenger, sternly calling out, delivering a speech, uttering a vow, the seafarers’ message to the earl, where he stood on the opposite [shore].)

So the Old English wicing was used generically to refer to raiders or pirates, people of the camps. In some of these instances, it alluded to or specifically referred to Norse raiders, but that wasn’t its primary sense. And in one instance, it was used as the name of a people, but which people is not known, although it doesn’t seem to refer to a Nordic one. So what we have is the fact that the Old English wicing originally meant simply a generic pirate.

The Old English wicing fell out of use following the Norman Conquest.

As for the Old Norse vikingr, that is only first recorded later, in the late tenth century. It is most likely a borrowing from either the English or Anglo-Frisian wicing. It could, however, have been plausibly formed within Old Norse from the root vikr, meaning bay or inlet. In that case, a vikingr would be someone who ventured forth from a coastal inlet.

As for our Present-Day English word viking, that word is a nineteenth-century borrowing from the Old Norse, or perhaps a resurrection of the Old English wicing. It appears in medievalesque literature of that century. We see it in George Chalmer’s 1807 history of Scotland, Caledonia, in a passage about Torfin, grandson of King Malcom II of Scotland:

<p style="margin-left: 50px;">At the age of fourteen, Torfin commenced his career as a vikingr. His sails often disquieted the coasts of Scotland during the reign of his grandfather.

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Sources:

Ælfric. Ælfrics Grammatik und Glossar. Julius Zupitza, ed. Berlin: Weidmannsche, 1880, 24. Archive.org.

Anlezark, Daniel, ed. Old Testament Narratives. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 7. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011, lines 331–35a, 228.

“The Battle of Maldon.” In Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems. Anglo-Saxon Poetic Record 6. New York: Columbia UP, 1942, lines 25–28, 7.

Chalmers, George. Caledonia (1807), vol. 1 of 3. Paisley, Scotland: Alexander Gardner, 1887, 341. Archive.org.

Fell, Christine. “Old English Wicing: A Question of Semantics” (13 November 1986). Proceedings of the British Academy, 72, 1986 295–316. The British Academy

Orosius. The Old English History of the World. Malcolm Godden, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 44. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 3.7, 172.

Oxford English Dicitionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. viking, n.

Pheifer, J. D. Old English Glosses in the Épinal-Erfurt Glossary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, 39.

“Widsith.” In Robert E. Bjork, ed. Old English Shorter Poems; Vol. II: Wisdom and Lyric. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 32, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2014, lines 45–49, 46.

Wulfstan. “Sermo lupi ad Anglos.” In Dorothy Bethurum, ed. The Homilies of Wulfstan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957, 261–66 at 263–64.

Photo credit: Adolph Edward Weidhaas, 1936. Wikimedia Commons. Library of Congress. Public domain image.