Old English Translator

Three different things called “Old English”

Search results for “old English translator” mix up three periods of the language and one lettering style, usually without saying which is which. Here they are side by side:

The Shakespearean mode writes the first kind. Posh British is a modern extra: how a stereotypical upper-class Brit might put it today. And the lettering line under every translation covers the fourth.

Thou, thee, thy or thine?

Getting these right is what separates a convincing “olde” line from a parody. The translator follows these rules:

thou

The one doing something, like “I”: Thou art kind.

thee

The one it happens to, like “me”: I thank thee.

thy

“Your” before a consonant: thy name.

thine

“Your” before a vowel, or “yours” on its own: thine eyes; the choice is thine.

-est, -st

Verb endings that go with thou: thou hast, thou dost, thou knowest, plus the odd ones thou art, thou wilt, thou shalt.

-eth

Verb endings for he, she or it: she goeth, he hath, it doth.

Thou wasn’t always fancy. In Middle English it was simply the word for one person, and ye was the plural. From the 1300s people began using the plural to address someone politely, so thou turned into the casual, close form, and by the 1600s it was dropping out of everyday speech in London. Wikipedia has the longer story of thou.

Old words that trip people up

The translator uses a handful of real Early Modern words. Most are easy to misread:

• Wherefore means “why”, not “where”. Juliet’s “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” asks why he has to be a Montague, not where he is.
• Anon means “soon” or “shortly”, which is why the translator uses it for “right now” with a wink.
• Ere means “before”: ere dinner.
• Prithee is a squashed “I pray thee”, so it works for “please”.
• Methinks means “it seems to me”, not “I think” in the sense of working something out.
• Gramercy comes from the Old French grant merci, “many thanks”.

Why “ye olde” really says “the”

English once had a letter for the “th” sound: þ, called thorn. Scribes wrote “the” as þe. When printing reached England in the late 1400s, the blackletter type that William Caxton and other printers brought over from the Low Countries had a y but no þ, so y stood in for it. “Ye olde shoppe” was always meant to be read “the old shop”. The fake-antique spelling took off much later; Wikipedia traces “ye olde” to 1896 or earlier. Our translator never adds it, for exactly that reason.

Can anything translate into real Old English?

Here is the first line of Beowulf, the best-known Old English poem, with a rough word-by-word meaning:

Almost none of that looks like English, and the grammar is further away than the words. Old English changed the endings of nouns and adjectives to show who did what to whom, gave every noun a gender, and allowed a much freer word order. A word-swap tool like ours can’t handle any of that, and general AI chatbots tend to invent words that look plausible. Even the first word, Hwæt, is still debated by scholars.

If you need the real thing for a tattoo, a book or a school project, look words up in the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, which is free online, and ask people who study the language to check your sentence.

Fun ways to use it

A few lines run through the translator above, exactly as it returns them:

• Party invitation: “You are invited to my birthday party. Please bring food!” becomes “Thou art invited to my birthday revelry. Prithee bring victuals!”
• Monday caption: “It is Monday and I need coffee.” becomes “'Tis Monday and I have need of coffee.”
• Tabletop roleplay: “Listen, friend, the dragon has gold.” becomes “Hark, friend, the dragon hath gold.”
• Posh thank-you: “Thanks guys, the party was awesome!” becomes “Much obliged ladies and gentlemen, the soirée was splendid!”

Shakespearean works best for short lines: invitations, captions, character dialogue, wedding signs. Posh British is better for jokes, menus and anything that should sound like a country-house butler.