Middle English
Spoken languageWikipedia
430
MENTIONS
176
EPISODES
96
PODCASTS
Search complete. 430 mentions across 176 episodes found for "Middle English".
Oct 29, 2026
Chris WhiteHOST
I'm going to give you a little origin story about the word bird and where it comes from.
Chris WhiteHOST
In Middle English, the word bird, spelt B-U-R-D, was used to refer to a young woman, a maiden or a lady.
Chris WhiteHOST
It appeared in poetry and romantic literature, sometimes describing a beautiful woman or someone admired by a man.
Chris WhiteHOST
It was associated with women described as ladies, maidens, or sometimes women of noble birth.
speaker_3UNKNOWN
purposes, or for other human activities.
speaker_3UNKNOWN
The word lake comes from Middle English lake, lake, pond, waterway.
Benjamin BosterHOST
From Old English laku, pond, pool, stream.
Benjamin BosterHOST
From Proto-Germanic lako, pond, ditch, slow-moving stream.
Nikkiana JonesHOST
It's crazy.
Jeff LippmanGUEST
And probably there were versions of the Bible written in Chaucer's Middle English or Old English.
Jeff LippmanGUEST
But yeah, I mean, it was Old Hebrew to New Hebrew to, you know, Seleucid or Koinok Greek, and then into Latin, and somewhere in there there's Aramaic books, and somewhere in there there's Arabic, but sometimes there's also Egyptian.
Jeff LippmanGUEST
And then, you know, and then there's some other languages in some of the other texts, and And, you know, Ethiopian languages weren't the same as the ones just across the water over there in the desert.
SteveHOST
As the presumed focus of the city, London Borough was moved back within the old Roman wars.
SteveHOST
The old settlement of London Vic gained the name of Eald Vic, Old Port Eald and the softer form of Vic transposed to Old and Witch in Middle English The street was created in the early 20th century in a project that saw a new street layout destroying Wych Street, which was full of overhangs and projections, and the construction of Australia House and Bush House .
SteveHOST
A statue of the 19th century Prime Minister William Gladstone was installed in 1905 near St Clement Dane's Church at the eastern end of Aldwych, In 1906, Aldwych tramway station was opened underneath Kingsway.
SteveHOST
It closed in 1952.
Anna KusmerHOST
Lee is a true Renaissance man with interests ranging from art to theater, history and science.
Anna KusmerHOST
His Middle English is probably better than yours.
Anna KusmerHOST
He can quote Chaucer at the drop of a hat.
Anna KusmerHOST
But his mind has come to an impasse.
SpencerHOST
Let's see.
SpencerHOST
Middle English grit from Old English gratt.
SpencerHOST
i don't know how they say it akin to the old high german gross gross which means large um so yeah just big a lot that's kind of where it came from i think and then it became uh just uh just good real good great skilled all right let's make a sound effect oh we got a bunch of words um it's gonna be whoo Next we have the second form of great.
SpencerHOST
This one is an adverb from the 13th century.
Jess ZafarrisGUEST
It was the word bride with the word ale on the end.
Jess ZafarrisGUEST
In Middle English and Old English, for a time, you could turn something into a party by attaching the word ale onto it.
Jess ZafarrisGUEST
So a scythe ale, for example, would be a harvest party.
Jess ZafarrisGUEST
A bride ale was a wedding feast.
Jess ZafarrisGUEST
It's been a journey.
Jess ZafarrisGUEST
I would say the boring answer is that the beginning of it was taking some linguistic courses as part of my undergraduate degree in English literature, anthropology, and Arabic.
Jess ZafarrisGUEST
And that was helpful for reading, say, old and middle English texts like Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales.
Jess ZafarrisGUEST
It kind of helps chart that course all the way through Shakespeare and then into late modern English.
Daniel AllisonHOST
My partner is a Thai Buddhist.
Daniel AllisonHOST
As a gift to her, I wrote a retelling of the first Buddha and Yasodhara story, in a style inspired by the Middle English alliterative verse tradition.
Daniel AllisonHOST
If you enjoy this style, please go and take a look at Simon Armitage's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lay of the Children of Hurin from The Lays of Beleriand.
Daniel AllisonHOST
I'm grateful for their inspiration.
Joshua LindellHOST
They've basically changed some of the names and places, but other than that, it's pretty much identical.
Joshua LindellHOST
And they have a song that they sing early in the movie at the pub, which is basically just like a modern English translation of an actual folk song that exists about the Lambton Worm, which if you go to the Wikipedia page for Lambton Worm, you can see The full lyrics to that song in Middle English, which is always kind of fun to read because it's it sounds like you're reading English and then you hit a funny word every once in a while.
Joshua LindellHOST
And so that that song, the story of the song is pretty much identical, including presumably that's why he rhymes news with coups.
Joshua LindellHOST
The worm milks a dozen coos.
Joshua LindellHOST
I don't know if that's a modern dialect that he's using, but if not, that's an original rhyme in the Middle English in the folk song.
Joshua LindellHOST
But then again later, when Angus is playing the bagpipes...
Joshua LindellHOST
That song is the actual tune of the Lambton Worm folk song, which Wikipedia also has a little audio clip of.
166 more episodes mention Middle English.
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