About the Michigan Early Modern English Materials

The Michigan Early Modern English Materials (MEMEM) were compiled by Richard W. Bailey, Jay L. Robinson, James W. Downer, with Patricia V. Lehman. The Materials consist of citations collected for the modal verbs and certain other English words for the Early Modern English Dictionary. Many of the slips used in the work were the original Oxford English Dictionary slips, provided to the University of Michigan by the editors of the OED. The work included here was prepared electronically over a period of several years ending in 1975.

The source file is ca. 16 megabytes and consists of ca. 50,000 records. The source file is available via anonymous ftp at ftp://ftp.umdl.umich.edu/pub/MEMEM.zip. This compressed file contains the materials, the DTD used to construct the materials and the character DTD.

The main file is also available from the Oxford Text Archive under the catalog number A-1693-E (the original, untagged files are A-171-E).

Corresponding print and microform publications exist for these materials. The main body of entries (36,000 modal verbs) can be found in: Michigan early modern English materials, Richard W. Bailey, James W. Downer, Jay L. Robinson, with Patricia V. Lehman. Ann Arbor : Xerox University Microfilms in cooperation with University of Michigan Press, 1975.

Enhancements to the system are planned.

January, 1994; header added
January, 1994, minor changes made in order to resolve inconsistencies noted in parsing.
1992, minimal SGML tagging added