---

Middle-English Word of the Day - February 21, 2008

Thwytel (n.) - a knife, whittle.

Ther was no man, for peril, dorste hym touche.
A sheffeld thwitel baar he in his hose.
Round was his face, and camus was his nose;
As piled as an ape was his skulle.

- Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury tales (1387-1394)

Pronunciation: /TwitEl/

Key
/T/ th in myth or thin
/w/ w in we, away
/i/ i in machine
/t/ t in tie
/E/ e in met
/l/ l in lily

The Middle-English Word of the Day is selected from Mayhew and Skeat's
"Concise Dictionary of Middle English."
As found on Greg Lindahl's website
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/concise/concise.html

The example text was found at the Middle English Collection of the University of Virginia Library.
http://etext.virginia.edu/collections/languages/english/mideng.browse.html

The approximate pronunciation is determined using Carol Hamill's Middle English Pronunciation Guide
and noted using upon the ASCII-IPA Standard
http://www.island.net/~hamill/medieval/mepronunc.html
http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/

---

The Middle-English Word of the Day is automatically distributed Monday through Friday.

To subscribe, send email to mewd-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

© Copyright 2008 Medieval Cookery

---