The Middle English Mouse Dictionary is a browser extension (Firefox, Chrome) that helps you to read middle english web pages by showing information about a word when you double click it.
When you double-click/tap a word in a webpage, your browser highlights that word and temporarily saves it in your browser's local data storage. When this happens our script extracts that word and checks a dictionary file that comes with this extension.
If the word you doubleclicked is in the dictionary, a small popup will appear next to your mouse with information about the word.
- The largest unannotated text resource, and one for which this extension is most suited, is the University of Michigan's Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.
- Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Kent's MEMSlib contains many digitizations.
- Harvard's Geoffery Chaucer Website.
- The International John Gower Society's Original Language Editions.
- You might check an old cookbook like The Forme of Cury, as edited by Samuel Pegge.
We wish to facilitate the enjoyment and study of historical texts, for enthusiasts and professionals alike. We sought to make a lookup tool that would only require access to a digitized text from an original manuscript.
We have coded this extension to be as simple as possible, avoiding using unnecessary frameworks and dependencies. This software is fully open-source and will continue as such in perpetuum.
- Dictionary: an error-corrected digitzation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "A Middle English Vocabulary" dictionary, provided by James K. Tauber of the Digital Tolkien Project.
- Dictionary: a digitization of A. L. Mayhew and Walter W. Skeat's "A Concise Dictionary of Middle English From A.D. 1150 To 1580", hosted by GiTenberg.
- Logo: the font in the logo is "Old English Gothic Pixel Font", designed by ColorSwitchFan25 and used under the SIL Open Font License (OFL)
