Middle English Translator

What is Middle English?

Middle English is the English spoken and written from about 1150 to 1500, between the Norman Conquest and the age of printing. It is the language of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Gawain poet and the first English Bible translations by John Wycliffe’s followers. It is far easier to read than Old English, yet its spelling, grammar and vocabulary still surprise modern readers: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote…”.

This translator rewrites modern English as late 14th-century London English in Chaucer’s style, and turns Middle English passages into plain modern English.

How to use the Middle English translator

1. Type or paste English. Up to 500 characters per translation on the free credits: a name, a motto, a message or a short passage.
2. Pick the direction. English → Middle English is the default. Press ⇄ to read Middle English words back into English.
3. Press Translate (or Ctrl + Enter). The result appears at once, with a reading line where the script needs one.
4. Listen. Press 🔊 Listen to hear it. Where your device has no voice for this language, it reads the transliteration with the closest voice and says “approximate”.
5. Copy it and read the notes under the result: they name any word we kept in English.

How the Middle English translator works

This translator runs on our own server from a Middle English dictionary and a set of grammar rules written for this language. It does not send your text to an outside service or an AI model, so results are instant and the same every time. The dictionary holds 261 words, 69 set phrases and 17 conjugated verbs.

For each sentence it first looks for the longest known phrase, then translates word by word and applies the rules below:

• Chaucer-era spellings such as knyght, whan, swich and eek
• verb endings of the period: he loveth, they loven, thou knowest
• thou and thee for “you”
• words with no Middle English form are kept as they are

Examples: real Middle English output

These results come straight from the tool, unedited:

Names, and any word the dictionary does not have, are kept as you wrote them and listed in the notes, so you never get an invented word.

Is this the best Middle English translator?

Translation apps such as Google Translate only translate between languages, so they cannot turn everyday English into Middle English. Chatbots can rewrite a style, but the result changes every time and is easy to overdo. This tool is predictable: each change comes from a written list of phrases and words, the same input always gives the same result, and anything it does not recognise is left exactly as you wrote it. It works best on short messages, captions and sentences. Read the result once before you use it, and adjust any line where the tone is not quite right.

Common Middle English words and phrases

Words and lines as they appear in Chaucer and his contemporaries.

History and origins

After 1066, French became the language of the court and law, while English carried on among most of the population and changed rapidly. Many endings dropped away, word order became fixed, and thousands of French words entered English. By the late 1300s English was back in official and literary use, and the London dialect, Chaucer’s, became the basis for modern standard English. William Caxton’s printing press (1476) began to fix spelling, and the Great Vowel Shift moved pronunciation towards Early Modern English.

Writing system

Middle English used the Latin alphabet with some Old English survivals. Þ (thorn) appears as “þ” or later as “y” (the origin of “ye olde”), and ȝ (yogh) wrote sounds like the “gh” in knyght and the “y” in ȝe (ye). Spelling varied from scribe to scribe and region to region.

How Middle English sounded

Chaucer’s English sounded closer to German or Dutch than to modern English: the “gh” in knyght was a throaty sound, the k was pronounced, and final -e was often a syllable. Long vowels had their “continental” values, so soote rhymed with “oat” rather than “boot”. Reading Chaucer aloud with these sounds restores the metre.

Famous texts

• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (late 1300s).
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 1300s, north-west Midlands dialect).
• William Langland, Piers Plowman.
• The Wycliffite Bible (1380s).
• Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (printed 1485).

Is Middle English still used today?

Middle English developed into Early Modern English around 1500, so no one speaks it today. It survives in place names, in fixed phrases, and in many dialect words of northern England and Scotland.

How to learn Middle English

Start with an edition that has glosses beside the text, such as the Riverside Chaucer or the University of Rochester’s TEAMS Middle English Texts, which are free online. The Middle English Dictionary from the University of Michigan is the reference for every word.

Before you use a translation for a tattoo, motto or gift

• Pick one period. Don’t mix Chaucer’s spellings with Shakespeare’s “thou art”.
• “Ye” was not pronounced “yee” in “ye olde”; the y was a thorn, so it was “the”.
• Keep it short for signs and invitations; a single line of real Chaucer often works better than a long imitation.

Sources

Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan; Larry D. Benson (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer (3rd ed., 1987); TEAMS Middle English Texts, University of Rochester.