Orm

(flourished c. 1200) Augustinian canon, author of an early Middle English book of metrical homilies on the Gospels, to which he gave the title Ormulum, “because Orm made it.” The work (dated on linguistic evidence c.

1200) is of little literary interest but of great value to linguists, for Orm—who clearly wished to spread sound teaching, derived mainly from works of Gregory the Great, Bede, and Aelfric—invented an individual and remarkably consistent orthography based on phonetic principles. Intended to help preachers when reading his work aloud, it shows, for example, the quantity (length) of the vowels by doubling a consonant after a short vowel in a closed syllable, and it distinguishes by three separate symbols sounds that in the Anglo-Celtic or insular script of Old English were all represented by a single symbol.