The translation of a number of the most basic terms associated with textiles and textile production is often considered relatively straightforward. Hraegl represents cloth or a garment, web woven cloth, and so forth. However, most words and images we see related to textiles, like Old English words more generally, are rarely so transparent and direct in meaning. In this study, dedicated appropriately to my teacher and friend, one of the world's most pre-eminent definers of Old English words, Dr Antonette diPaolo Healey, I will examine ways in which the ‘meanings’ of textile words can prove as semiotic as semantic: each word is a sign that represents both letter sounds and a category or variety of possible objects and connotative elements and thus resists simple denotative translation. I will focus on the Old English word gyrdels as a case in point and investigate what we lose if we simply call a gyrdels a ‘girdle’.

Based on sight recognition, the Old English word gyrdel/gyrdels (which I am considering as two variants of the same word) might be easily defined and translated as a ‘girdle or belt’. That definition ignores, however, the range of contemporary denotations and connotations for the first word, girdle, which differ dramatically in some respects from the medieval dress equivalents, but it also ignores the complication that the meaning ‘belt’ is a latecomer to the discussion, occurring only in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, and even rarely, then.

More nuanced definitions for the term appear in dictionaries of Old English. In An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller give gyrdel/gyrdels four possible defintions, ‘girdle, belt, zone, purse’, and the Dictionary of Old English an even wider range, including ‘belt’, ‘girdle’, ‘pouch/purse’, ‘the part of the body around which the belt is fastened’, and ‘zone or region of the earth’, in addition to its meanings in glossing Latin words for ‘belt’, ‘girdle’, ‘twisted band’, ‘breast-band’, ‘buckle or strap for fastening a belt’, and ‘sword-belt’.

In the chapter she has contributed to the current volume, M. J. Toswell gives a pen-portrait of an ideal writer of a dictionary:

Those who read this passage will picture Professor Antonette diPaolo Healey perfecting the music of lexicography by working on one Old English word after another. Indeed, Professor Healey and other editors at the Dictionary of Old English project have produced thousands of lexicographical symphonies (that is, word entries) and enriched our field through the publications of word-albums (that is, fascicles). Every time we look up a word in the Dictionary of Old English (DOE), we can recognize the efforts of Toni and her colleagues to strike a balance among various components to create perfect harmony.

We are therefore very proud to present Professor Healey with this volume as ‘a small token’, to borrow from Roy Liuzza's chapter, of our ‘great gratitude – far more than words can express here – for her exemplary scholarship as well as her friendship and encouragement’ (p. 198). Professor Healey is many things to members in the field of Old English studies. Stephen Pelle reminds us that she has also published the editio princeps of the Old English Vision of St. Paul, a text that is of great interest not only to Anglo-Saxonists but also to scholars in many other fields (p. 80). As Damian Fleming points out, she is ‘an exceptional classroom teacher’ who ‘has surely earned a place in the field as exalted as Bede or Ælfric‘(p. 199). But above all, Professor Healey is without doubt the Old English lexicographer of our time: as Donald Scragg writes, ‘she will go down in the history of our subject with Joseph Bosworth and Thomas Northcote Toller’ (p. 228).