Dear Colleagues,

Most of you need no introduction to the splendid work of the Dictionary of Old English and its importance to the work of Anglo-Saxonists worldwide. I am writing on behalf of the Dictionary to enlist your aid.

At the end of 2013, the DOE was awarded a five-year, $500,000 Challenge Grant from the Triangle Family Foundation of Raleigh, North Carolina. To release each annual installment of the grant, the Dictionary must secure new matching funds from other sources. So far two $100,000 installments have been matched and released, but the editorial team is concerned that it will not meet its target to match the third installment by April 1, 2016. In this time of urgency, they have asked me to reach out to people who might be able to support this worthy project.

Such matching means that what you donate now will have maximum impact. Every dollar you give will provide two dollars to the Dictionary; every pound, euro, or yen will be a double gift. Your donation will ensure that the work of the Dictionary continues.

This is a particularly exciting time for the project. The current editorial team -- co-editors Stephen Pelle and Robert Getz and Drafting Editor Val Pakis -- are readying H for publication. This is a large and complex set of entries, many years in the making, and its publication will mark a significant step towards completion of the Dictionary. With the publication of H, the DOE will also make public some significant improvements of its user interface and search functions, as well as the latest updated version of the Corpus of Old English and a fully updated set of entries for A-G. DOE entries are now reciprocally linked to the OED, the MED, and the Corpus of Narrative Etymologies project at the University of Edinburgh. In addition, a number of thumbnail images from Parker on the Web are included to help clarify problematic citations. In these and other ways, the DOE continues to expand its role as a pioneer in the field of digital lexicography and an indispensable resource for scholars in our field.

Your support in the past has done the project an enormous amount of good with granting agencies and foundations and within the University of Toronto itself. You have demonstrated by your generosity that you, who are best able to judge the worth of the DOE because you use it in your research, value it highly. And so we turn to you again. Please help support this important project by giving as generously as you can. Donations can be made online; simply visit 

https://donate.utoronto.ca/give/show/59 

and fill in the box for ‘Dictionary of Old English’. Donations by check (made out to ‘DOE/University of Toronto’) or credit card can also be sent by mail; a convenient donation form can be downloaded from 

http://web.utk.edu/~rliuzza/DOE_Donations_Page.pdf 

and sent to


Dictionary of Old English
Room 14285, Robarts Library
130 St. George Street
Toronto, ON M5S 3H1
CANADA