For students of French historical linguistics, a French-Old French dictionary (in distinction to the Old French-French dictionaries of Godefroy, Lacurne de Sainte-Palaye, and R. Grandsaignes d'Hauterive and the Old French dictionary of Tobler-Lommatzsch with definitions in German) has long been a desideratum. The disadvantage of the failure of scholars to append to their studies of medieval texts and dialect studies an index of meanings cast in the standard language has been pointed out by Yakov Malkiel.l The Reverend Joseph P. Murray showed by his choice of such a topic for a doctoral dissertation an awareness of the need for a reference work in which the Old French equivalents for a given English word could be easily found. 2 Unfortunately the small volume written by Murray, because ofits extremely Iimited scope, fails to till the need for the desired reference work. Instead of choosing the works of one author, as the writer did for a study entitled La sinonimia en las obras de Gonzalo de Berceo3 or the vocabulary attested in one particular period, the procedure suggested by W. von Wartburg,4 Murray seems to have chosen a small number of words at random concentrating, as he states in his preface, on words which express the various designations of animais, parts of the body, common plants and minerais, institutions, feasts, customs, virtues, vices, ideals, and beliefs familiar to the speaker of Old French. An example will show the limitations of such a procedure: for 'hattie' and 'combat,' Murray Iists nine words (bellacion, boroflement, champ, chapleis, complote, eschapleis, esbaudie, eschec, and preliation) whereas W. von