Old English is the earliest form of the English language, spoken and written in England from roughly 450 to 1150 AD. If you tried to read Old English today, you wouldn't recognize it as English at all. It looks and sounds more like German or another foreign language, with completely different spelling, grammar, and vocabulary.

The famous epic poem Beowulf was written in Old English. Where we might say “the king was very brave,” Old English would say something like “se cyning wæs swiðe cene.” Even simple words were different: “house” was hus, “water” was wæter, and “book” was boc.

Old English came from Germanic tribes called the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who settled in Britain after the Romans left. That's why the language is also called Anglo-Saxon. When the Normans conquered England in 1066, French began mixing with Old English, gradually transforming it into Middle English and eventually into the Modern English we speak today.

When scholars talk about Old English literature or an Old English word's origin, they're reaching back over 900 years to a language that would sound completely foreign to us now, even though it's the ancestor of the words you're reading right now.