This dictionary was written by Colin Gorrie, author of the Old English textbook Ōsweald Bera, along the lines of Henry Sweet’s (1897) The Student’s Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon (available on Archive.org).
Like Sweet’s dictionary, the goal of this dictionary is to provide students of Old English with an easy-to-use resource for consultation while reading. My aim is to improve upon Sweet’s work not only in the ergonomics of the dictionary – an online dictionary is, after all, easier to search through and is not constrained by lack of space – but also in its scope. Where Sweet includes occasional idiomatic phrases and examples, I have designed this dictionary to provide many.
Similarly, where Sweet offers occasional usage information (e.g., which verbs take the dative), my aim is to be much more comprehensive in explaining not only what words mean but how they are used. For that reason, I have included, for example, extensive information about argument structure in the entries of verbs: i.e., how many arguments verbs take in their different senses, and what cases these arguments are expressed in.
In my experience teaching Old English, skill and confidence in composition often lead to mastery of reading. When a student understands fully how to use a verb to express his or her own ideas, that verb will pose no problems when it is next encountered in a text.
Although most scholars prefer the term “Old English” over “Anglo-Saxon” in recent years, the name Anglo-Saxon Dictionary had the great virtue that I could get an easy-to-remember domain for it at anglosaxondictionary.com.