This is a volume of selected papers presented at the International Conference on Historical English Word-Formation and Semantics held in Warsaw on 10-11 December 2011 and organized by the School of English at the Warsaw Division of the University of Social Sciences in Lódz. The conference was attended by scholars from Poland, USA, Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, Japan, Italy, Ukraine and Slovakia. 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 s¿l '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 leode: A case study of the two manuscripts of Läamon's Brut - Xavier Dekeyser: Loss of the prototypical meaning related to lexical borrowing. The battle of (near) synonyms: A case study - Bozena 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 - Radoslaw 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 Kieltyka: Sniff danger and wietrzyc podstep: On the categorization of verbal zoosemy - Malgorzata Klos: 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 Welna: The regional aspects of the distribution of nouns in -ling in Middle English.