Translate modern English into real Old English - the language of Beowulf and King Alfred, written with þ, ð and æ - or paste Anglo-Saxon text and read it in plain modern English. Both directions, one box.
Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, was spoken in England from roughly 450 to 1150, after Germanic settlers (Angles, Saxons and Jutes) arrived from the continent. It is the direct ancestor of modern English, but it looks foreign: nouns have cases, verbs have rich endings, there are grammatical genders, and the alphabet includes þ (thorn), ð (eth), æ (ash) and ƿ (wynn). Note that Old English is not Shakespeare - "thee" and "thou" belong to Early Modern English, and Chaucer wrote Middle English. If that is what you want, try our Shakespeare translator or Middle English translator.
Greetings and famous lines in normalised West Saxon spelling. Macrons mark long vowels and dotted ġ and ċ are modern study aids - scribes did not write them. Pronunciations are scholarly reconstructions: every letter is sounded, ċ is "ch", ġ is "y", and þ/ð are both "th".
Plenty of "Old English generators" just sprinkle thee, thou and ye olde over modern text. translator.im writes Anglo-Saxon - with its own grammar, vocabulary and letters.
Output uses þ, ð and æ where the language needs them, so it looks like an edition of Beowulf rather than a pub sign.
Old English nouns change for case and have grammatical gender, and verbs like ġiefan (give) change their vowel in the past: ġeaf. The model reads whole sentences so these forms fit together.
Write modern English to get Old English, or swap and paste a passage of Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or Ælfric to read it in plain English.
Old English was spoken before the Norman Conquest of 1066 brought in French. The translator prefers native words and compounds - the way Anglo-Saxon poets did.
Image mode reads printed Old English from a textbook or screenshot in your browser. Check þ, ð and æ in the recognised text before translating - they are easy for OCR to misread.
Copy the result with one tap. Listen uses your device's modern voices, so for authentic sound rely on the reconstructed pronunciation guide above.
Medieval literature students, fantasy writers, history buffs and fans of Anglo-Saxon England all end up here.
Paste the original and get a plain-English version to check against your own translation for class.
Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon, and Rohan speaks a version of it. Name places, write oaths and coin titles with genuine Old English.
Compare familiar texts such as the Lord's Prayer with their Old English versions to see how the language worked.
Watched one too many episodes of a Viking-age drama? Write lines, greetings and toasts your characters would recognise.
Three things that save confusion - and a few surprised faces.
If you want Romeo-and-Juliet English, you want Early Modern English - use the Shakespeare translator. If you want Chaucer, use the Middle English translator. This page goes back further, to the Anglo-Saxons.
There is no Old English word for "phone" or "email". The translator will describe the idea or build a compound, much as poets did when they called the sea hronrād, the "whale-road".
þ and ð both sound like "th", æ is the vowel in "cat", sc is "sh" (scip = ship), and f between vowels sounds like v. Knowing these four makes most Old English instantly more readable.
No account, no install. Write modern English for Anglo-Saxon, or paste Old English for a modern translation - free.