This is a volume of selected papers presented at the International Conference on Historical English Word-Formation and Semantics held in Warsaw in 2011. The conference was attended by scholars from ten countries. Their papers covered a wide range of topics concerning the area of word formation and semantics in Old and Middle English.

Contents: Dieter Kastovsky: English prefixation: A historical sketch – D. Gary Miller: On the history and analysis of V-P nouns – Grzegorz A. Kleparski: Historical semantics: A sketch on new categories and types of semantic change – Hans Sauer: Reginald Pecock and his vocabulary: A preliminary sketch – Magdalena Bator: Verbs of cooking in Middle English: fry, roast and bake – Michael Bilynsky: Unanalysable verb-related coinages as reflected in the OED textual prototypes – Olga Chupryna: Old English sǣl ‘time’: Metaphor and metonymy in word and text – Gaye Çinkiliç/Helmut Weiß: Historical word formation in German. On the interpretation of N-N compounds – Ewa Ciszek: Middle English decline of the Old English word lēode: A case study of the two manuscripts of Laʒamon’s Brut – Xavier Dekeyser: Loss of the prototypical meaning related to lexical borrowing. The battle of (near) synonyms: A case study – Bożena Duda: From portcwene to fille de joie: On etymology and the word-formation processes behind the historical lexical representations in the category FALLEN WOMAN in English – Radosław Dylewski: The first years of dude. What else can early American newspapers and the COHA tell us about its early meanings and usages? – Camiel Hamans: Historical word-formation caught in the present – changes in modern usage – Robert Kiełtyka: Sniff danger and wietrzyć podstęp: On the categorization of verbal zoosemy – Małgorzata Kłos: Old English poetic diction and the language of death: Circumlocutory terms denoting the sense ‘die’ in Anglo-Saxon poetry – Beata Kopecka: Whatever the weather - on semantic change and word-formation processes – Anya Kursova: Folk-etymologies: On the way to improving naturalness – Olivier Simonin: The semantics of noun postmodifying to-infinitives in Old English – Marta Sylwanowicz: Names of medicines in Early Modern English medical texts (1500-1700) – Agnieska Wawrzyniak: Metaphors of darkness in The Canterbury Tales – Jerzy Wełna: The regional aspects of the distribution of nouns in -ling in Middle English.