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This is a list of English words inherited and derived directly from the Old English stage of the language. This list also includes neologisms formed from Old English roots and/or particles in later forms of English, and words borrowed into other languages (e.g. French, Anglo-French, etc.) then borrowed back into English (e.g. bateau, chiffon, gourmet, nordic, etc.).
Old English was first written using Anglo-Saxon runes in the 5th century. In 597, the arrival of the Gregorian mission in Kent marked the beginning of the Christianisation of Anglo-Saxon England, and with it the reintroduction of the Latin alphabet to Britain, where it was used to write English for the first time.
QWERTY, one of the few native English words with Q not followed by U, is derived from the first six letters of a standard keyboard layout. In English, the letter Q is almost always followed immediately by the letter U, e.g. quiz, quarry, question, squirrel. However, there are some exceptions.
(Nordic languages, such as Old English, have a lightning-bolt-like mark for words ending in er.) The r rotunda with a cut (ꝵ) generally stood for -rum (a common genitive plural ending in Latin), but it could also stand for a truncation after the letter r.
It is also related more distantly to Latin words starting with ambi-and Greek words starting with amphi-. [1] Compare with German um, Dutch om, Common Scandinavian om and Icelandic um. wīġ: 'war', 'combat', 'martial power'. There were many words of this root in Old English: wīgan, ġewegan ('to fight'), wīġend ('warrior').
The words in brackets are implied in the Old English by noun case and the bold words in brackets are explanations of words that have slightly different meanings in a modern context. What is used by the poet where a word like lo or behold would be expected.
Eth (/ ɛ ð / edh, uppercase: Ð , lowercase: ð ; also spelled edh or eð), known as ðæt in Old English, [1] is a letter used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), and Elfdalian. It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with dh , and later d .
The Old English phoneme /f/ descended in some cases from Proto-Germanic *f, which became [v] between voiced sounds as described above. But /f/ also had another source. In the middle or at the end of words, Old English /f/ was often derived from Proto-Germanic * [β] (also written *ƀ), a fricative allophone of the phoneme *b.