---
title: "Martín Arista, Javier, ed., Sara Domínguez Barragán, Luisa"
description: "This piece is Ondřej Tichý's review of Nerthusv5, the fifth release of a long-running open-access lexical database of Old… 13 references."
authors: ["Ondrej Tichy"]
year: 2025
venue: "SELIM 30"
source: "https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/SELIM/article/view/22753"
licence: "CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; SELIM)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tichy-2025-martin-arista-javier-ed-sara/"
---
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# Martín Arista, Javier, ed., Sara Domínguez Barragán, Luisa Fidalgo Allo, Laura García Fernández, Yosra Hamdoun Bghiyel, Miguel Lacalle Palacios, Raquel Mateo Mendaza, Carmen Novo Urraca, Ana Elvira Ojanguren López, Esaúl Ruiz Narbona, Roberto Torre Alonso, Marta Tío Sáenz, and Raquel Vea Escarza. 2024. “Nerthusv5. Interface of textual, lexicographical and secondary sources of Old English.” www.nerthusproject.com.

**Authors:** Ondrej Tichy · **Year:** 2025 · **Venue:** [SELIM 30](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/selim-journal-of-the-spanish-society-for-medieval-english-language-and/) ([SELIM Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 2025](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/selim-journal-of-the-spanish-society-for-medieval-english-language-and/2025/)) · **Publisher:** [University of Oviedo](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/university-of-oviedo/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; SELIM)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.30.2025.245-54) · [PDF](https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/SELIM/article/download/22753/17165) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4413083192)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
This piece is Ondřej Tichý's review of Nerthusv5, the fifth release of a long-running open-access lexical database of Old English, and of its companion corpus ParCorOE. Nerthus holds 32,812 headwords. For each one it records dictionary forms, spellings, definitions, morphology and word-formation data such as base, affix, lexical prime and ge-prefixation. It also links to several standard OE dictionaries and draws example sentences from ParCorOE. ParCorOE pairs OE text with public-domain English translations at the sentence level and with English glosses at the token level. Every token is lemmatized and given detailed morphological tags.

Tichý tested both resources in several browsers and concludes that they are valuable. He also finds that a FileMaker WebDirect interface without links or proper result lists holds them back, as does the lack of downloadable data. He points to concrete data errors: duplicated entries, misaligned Latin glosses, wrong lemmas that spread from the corpus into the dictionary, and homonyms that merged. His recommendations are standard data exports, clickable cross-links, KWIC views, stable identifiers and further data cleaning.

## Key points
- Nerthus has 32,812 entries. Its dictionary information rests on Clark-Hall (1916), and it adds data from Bosworth-Toller, Sweet and the DOE (A–I only).
- ParCorOE (version 3) has about 300,000 tokens. That makes it about one-fifth the size of the York-Toronto-Helsinki Old English prose corpus (YCOE) and about one-tenth the size of the DOEC.
- Each ParCorOE token carries a unique ID (ParCorOE_Number), an OE lemma, a word class, inflectional tags and a PDE gloss. Alignment works at two levels: fragments and tokens.
- The interface has several problems:
  - no clickable links between the two resources;
  - the search query is not shown alongside the results;
  - Chrome and Edge drop the final character of a query;
  - results appear one per page instead of as a list or KWIC;
  - no downloadable datasets, for example in TEI-XML.
- Example errors include the following:
  - ēarmǣlum appears three times.
  - Hælendum is glossed with Latin "perpetuum" because of an alignment slip.
  - untosprecendlican is lemmatized as untōlȳsendlic, and this mistake carried over into Nerthus.
  - dǣl and dæl share one definition.

## Interesting ideas
- Compute edit distance between each headword and its alternative spellings and inflected forms, then hand-check only the extreme values; this cheaply surfaces mislemmatized forms in a large lexicon.
- One wrong lemma in the corpus quietly became a wrong inflected form in the linked dictionary, which shows how errors travel between coupled resources.
- Normalize spelling variants (eth/thorn) only in the secondary layer of lemmas or search, and leave the primary text untouched so that variant-level research stays possible.
- Align at two granularities: a free sentence translation for meaning plus token glosses that may be many-to-one, accepting that the glosses do not form fluent text.
- When homonymous lemmas collide in automatic processing, one sense's definition leaks onto the other, so sense keys must be explicit rather than inferred from the surface form.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (tokens): Run this check over the lemma tables in crate en, so that word–lemma pairs with an implausible distance are flagged for review.
- **I2** (learn): Tag silver-data facts with their source, so that a repair rule which fixes a lemma can also withdraw everything that was derived from it.
- **I3** (tokens): Keep raw surface forms in tokens and apply normalization only in lemma and lookup fields, so the tagger can still study original spellings.
- **I4** (back): Translation through the meta-world could keep token-to-concept links next to sentence-level output, which keeps every generation choice traceable.
- **I5** (world): Key ontology and WordNet links by sense ID instead of by lemma string, so that homonyms in the knowledge graph do not merge.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Ondrej Tichy. 2025. Martín Arista, Javier, ed., Sara Domínguez Barragán, Luisa Fidalgo Allo, Laura García Fernández, Yosra Hamdoun Bghiyel, Miguel Lacalle Palacios, Raquel Mateo Mendaza, Carmen Novo Urraca, Ana Elvira Ojanguren López, Esaúl Ruiz Narbona, Roberto Torre Alonso, Marta Tío Sáenz, and Raquel Vea Escarza. 2024. “Nerthusv5. Interface of textual, lexicographical and secondary sources of Old English.” www.nerthusproject.com. SELIM 30.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{tichy2025martin,
  title = {{Martín Arista, Javier, ed., Sara Domínguez Barragán, Luisa Fidalgo Allo, Laura García Fernández, Yosra Hamdoun Bghiyel, Miguel Lacalle Palacios, Raquel Mateo Mendaza, Carmen Novo Urraca, Ana Elvira Ojanguren López, Esaúl Ruiz Narbona, Roberto Torre Alonso, Marta Tío Sáenz, and Raquel Vea Escarza. 2024. “Nerthusv5. Interface of textual, lexicographical and secondary sources of Old English.” www.nerthusproject.com.}},
  author = {Ondrej Tichy},
  booktitle = {SELIM 30},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.30.2025.245-54},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.30.2025.245-54}
}
```

- [← previous Lucas, Peter J. 2024. Old English Poetry from Manuscript to Message. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 58. Turnhout: Brepols. Pp. xviii + 398. ISBN 9782503600314.](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/griffith-2025-lucas-peter-j-2024-old/)
- [next → Math Natural Language Inference: this should be easy!](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/paiva-2025-math-natural-language-inference-this/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2025](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2025/page/17/)

## References

13 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Bosworth, Joseph, and Thomas N. Toller. 1921. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Based on the Manuscript Collections of Joseph Bosworth. Supplement by Thomas N. Toller. Oxford: Clarendon Press. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Bosworth%2C+Joseph%2C+and+Thomas+N%2E+Toller%2E+1921%2E+An+Anglo%2DSaxon+Dictionary%3A+Based+on+the+Manuscript+Collections+of+Joseph+Bosworth%2E+Supplement+by+Thomas+N%2E+Toller%2E+Oxford%3A+Clarendon+Press%2E)
2. Cameron, Angus, Ashley C. Amos, Antonette diPaolo Healey, Roy Liuzza, and Haruko Momma, eds. 2018. Dictionary of Old English: A to I Online. Dictionary of Old English Project. [https://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/](https://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/). [↗](https://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/)
3. Clark Hall, John R. 1916. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary for the Use of Students. 2nd ed., rev. and enl. New York: The Macmillan Company. diPaolo Healey, Antonette, John P. Wilkin, and Xin Xiang. eds. 2009. Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus. Dictionary of Old English Project. [http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doecorpus/](http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doecorpus/). [↗](http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doecorpus/)
4. García Fernández, Laura. 2021. “Insights into Old English Lexicography: Lemmatisation of gĀn and Its Prefix-Formations Using a Corpus-Based Database.” International Journal of Lexicography 34 (4): 493–508. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Garc%C3%ADa+Fern%C3%A1ndez%2C+Laura%2E+2021%2E+%E2%80%9CInsights+into+Old+English+Lexicography%3A+Lemmatisation+of+g%C4%80n+and+Its+Prefix%2DFormations+Using+a+Corpus%2DBased+Database%2E%E2%80%9D+International+Journal+of+Lexicography+34+%284%29%3A+493)
5. Kharlamenko, Oxana. 2020. “The Expression of Non-Individual in Some Old English Nouns.” In Of ye Olde Englisch. Language and Textes: New Perspectives on Old and Middle English Language and Literature, edited by Rodrigo Pérez Lorido, Carlos Prado-Alonso, and Paula Rodríguez-Puente, 25– 50. Berlin: Peter Lang. [↗](https://doi.org/10.13140/rg.2.2.31419.37927)
6. Martín Arista, Javier. 2021. “Word Alignment in a Parallel Corpus of Old English Prose.” In Corpora in Translation and Contrastive Research in the Digital Age, edited by Julia Lavid-López, Carmen Maíz-Arévalo, and Juan R. Zamorano-Mansilla, 75–100. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.158.03mar)
7. Martín Arista, Javier. 2024a. “Toward a Universal Dependencies Treebank of Old English: Representing the Morphological Relatedness of Un-Derivatives.” Languages 9 (3): 76. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages 9030076. [↗](https://doi.org/10.3390/languages)
8. Martín Arista, Javier. 2024b. “Interface of Old English Dictionaries in Database Format: Toward a Knowledge Base.” In Structuring Lexical Data and Digitising Dictionaries, edited by Javier Martín Arista and Ana E. Ojanguren López, 150–83. Leiden: Brill. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004702660_008)
9. Novo Urraca, Carmen. 2016. “Morphological Relatedness and the Typology of Adjectival Formations in Old English.” Studia Neophilologica 88 (1): 43–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2016.1150788 . [↗](https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2016.1150788)
10. Sweet, Henry. 1967. Anglo-Saxon Primer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Sweet%2C+Henry%2E+1967%2E+Anglo%2DSaxon+Primer%2E+Oxford%3A+Clarendon+Press%2E)
11. Taylor, Ann, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Frank Beths. 2003. The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. Electronic Texts and Manuals Available from the Oxford Text Archive. [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/histcorpora/PCME2RELEASE](http://www.ling.upenn.edu/histcorpora/PCME2RELEASE) 4/index.html. [↗](http://www.ling.upenn.edu/histcorpora/PCME2RELEASE)
12. TimAcri. 2025. “Webdirect is Removing the Last Character When Tabbing or Clicking out of a Field” Claris Community (blog). February 19. [https://community.claris.com/en/s/question/0D5Vy00000bbdzfKAA/webd](https://community.claris.com/en/s/question/0D5Vy00000bbdzfKAA/webd) irect-is-removing-the-last-character-when-tabbing-or-clicking-out-of-a-field. [↗](https://community.claris.com/en/s/question/0D5Vy00000bbdzfKAA/webd)
13. Zimmermann, Richard. 2013. “The Nerthus Proyect” A New Old English Language Online Database. Old Engli.Sh: The Portal to the Language of the Anglo-Saxons review. (blog). [https://old-engli.sh/news.php?ID=news-Nerthus-](https://old-engli.sh/news.php?ID=news-Nerthus-) [↗](https://old-engli.sh/news.php?ID=news-Nerthus-)

*Updated 1 November 2026*