I will definitely start paying more attention to Wiktionary, as I believe only a full compilation of English words from the 450s through to today can truly be deemed a fair lexical choice for the native speaking masses, especially the century of vocabulary before Hastings. I've been very lucky to have correspondence with David Cowley who has, hallows be thanked, given us the Old English update manual '' How We'd Talk If The English Had Won In 1066 '' and ''Words We'd Wield If We'd Won'' . With steering-texts such as his, then it may just be possible to re-imbue our mother tongue with some of its own core wordstock and replace and instead needless and confusing examples of sesquipedalianism :/

Re the last post... I obviously meant '' ...from the 12th Century onwards'' and not ''by''.

My biggest problem presently is with the OED's interminable idiocy in discounting words that weren't in English by the 12th Century. If English is counted as an extant language, or living tongue, from the point of conception - then why does the OED have the audacity to discount 700 years of its vocabulary? No other language does this as far as I'm aware. Being English, I also take issue with those of my landsmen who seem to proclaim the hypocritical view of Alfred the Great as true king of the English but only consider viewing their country's characteristics and mannerisms as being of worth if hailing from post-Norman conquest England.

Oh, read something in one of the earlier comments about the fact that certain words of English originally came from Low German of Latin origin - that's no problem at all - seeing as English should only be counting words from its own beginnings, and not those borrowings from before it was conceived. Otherwise it would be as mad as a Frenchman taking umbrage with the Romans for taking Germanic words into Latin before French came into being.