About

About Old Norse Dictionary

Old Norse Dictionary is an independent online reference for reading, searching, and understanding Old Norse vocabulary. The site is built around the public-domain scholarship of Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, whose Icelandic-English Dictionary remains one of the most important historical dictionaries for Old Norse and Old Icelandic studies.

Our Purpose

Our goal is to make a historically important lexical resource easier to explore in a modern browser. Students, translators, researchers, writers, and readers of sagas or medieval Scandinavian texts can use the site to look up entries, browse by initial letter, follow abbreviations, and connect terms with cited works and authors.

Editorial Approach

The dictionary material is presented as a study aid, not as a replacement for specialist philological judgment. We preserve the scholarly character of the source material while improving navigation, searchability, mobile readability, and cross-reference access. When modern interface text is added, it is intended to clarify the user experience without changing the historical dictionary entries themselves.

Who Uses This Site

Old Norse Dictionary is designed for a wide audience: university students reading Old Norse for the first time, independent learners studying Viking Age language and literature, researchers checking a form quickly, and general readers curious about the vocabulary behind Norse mythology, sagas, law codes, and poetry.

Ongoing Improvements

We continue to improve spelling navigation, entry formatting, source abbreviation pages, multilingual interface support, and the overall reading experience. If you notice a technical issue or a page that is difficult to use, your feedback helps us make the resource more reliable and useful.