This article describes the manual construction of a part of the Old English WordNet (Old-EWN) covering the semantic field of emotion terms. This manually constructed part of the wordnet is to be eventually integrated with the automatically generated/manually checked part covering the whole of the rest of the Old English lexicon (currently under construction). We present the workflow for the definition of these emotion synsets on the basis of a dataset produced by a specialist in this area. We also look at the enrichment of the original Global WordNet Association Lexical Markup Framework (GWA LMF) schema to include the extra information which this part of the OldEWN requires. In the final part of the article we discuss how the wordnet style of lexicon organisation can be used to share and disseminate research findings/datasets in lexical semantics.

In this paper we will discuss our preliminary work towards the construction of a WordNet for Old English, taking our inspiration from other similar WN construction projects for ancient languages such as Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. The Old English WordNet (OldEWN) will build upon this innovative work in a number of different ways which we articulate in the article, most importantly by treateating figurative meaning as a ‘first-class citizen’ in the structuring of the semantic system. From a more practical perspective we will describe our plan to utilize a pre-existing lexicographic resource and the naisc system to automatically compile a provisional version of the WordNet which will then be checked and enriched by Old English experts.