What if the arrow had missed?
If Harold had won, would you be eating cowflesh?
After 1066, French became the language of England's rulers, and over the next few centuries more than ten thousand French words poured into English. Paste any text below and see which words came in through that door. Then read it back in Anglish, English with the borrowings swapped for Old English roots.
The Saxon-o-meter
Highlighted like this = borrowed from French or Latin (and a few Greek words that came through Latin). Hover or tap a highlighted word to see its swap.
Your words, marked up
If Harold had won (Anglish version)
How it works: we check each word against a hand-built list of 300+ common borrowed words. Words not on the list count as native, so the score is a fun estimate, not a linguistic analysis. Most of the "Saxon" swaps come from the long tradition of Anglish, a name coined by the humorist Paul Jennings in his 1966 Punch series "1066 and All Saxon".
Norman or Saxon? The 60-second sprint
A word appears. Did it come from Old English (the Saxons' tongue) or arrive from French or Latin? Use the buttons or your arrow keys (← Saxon, → Norman). Some of the answers are traps.
The great swap list
A sample of the borrowed words (gold) and their Saxon swaps (green). Some swaps are real Old English words that dropped out of use: leech for doctor, frith for peace, steven for voice. Others are modern Anglish coinages like farseer (television) and wordbook (dictionary).
A myth to watch for: people often say the Normans ate the beef while Saxon peasants herded the cows. There's something real behind the story, but the French meat words only turn up in English writing around 1300, more than 200 years after the Conquest.