Anglo Saxon Translator

The Anglo-Saxons were a mix of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who settled Britain after the Romans left. The language they brought became what we now call Anglo-Saxon or Old English — spoken from roughly 450 to 1100 AD, before the Norman Conquest in 1066 let French quietly rewrite half the vocabulary. Open Beowulf and you're reading it. Read King Alfred's writings from the 800s, also Anglo-Saxon.

When you translate English to Anglo-Saxon, the output uses real grammar and vocabulary from that period. Special letters like þ (thorn), ð (eth), æ (ash), and ƿ (wynn) appear where they actually belong. The word order shifts, the vocabulary goes back a thousand years, and it stops feeling like a costume.

Your Anglo-Saxon translation is about ten seconds away:

1. Type or paste English into the left box
2. Hit Translate to convert English to Anglo-Saxon instantly
3. Copy the result or listen to it out loud

To decode, type Anglo-Saxon into the left box and click Swap before translating. The Anglo-Saxon to English translator direction handles the reverse just as well.

Real sentences running through the translator:

Output shifts a little each run. Anglo-Saxon had regional dialects (Mercian, West Saxon, Kentish, Northumbrian), so the same English sentence can land in slightly different forms depending on which dialect the model leans toward.

A few real reasons people reach for an Anglo-Saxon translator:

• Homework and school projects: Beowulf, King Alfred, early medieval England — seeing the original language hits differently than reading about it.
• Fantasy writing and worldbuilding: Anglo-Saxon words have actual weight. Modern English dressed up to sound old doesn't.
• Tattoos and inscriptions: Short phrases in Anglo-Saxon, sometimes rendered in Futhorc runes.
• Genealogy and curiosity: Family names from Saxon England sound very different when you hear the original language they came from.

A friend of mine asked for his daughter's name translated into Anglo-Saxon for a baby announcement. It hit differently than the Latin version he'd also tried. More grounded. Less theme park.

Before fully adopting the Latin alphabet, Anglo-Saxons used their own runic system called Futhorc (also spelled Fuþorc). It's related to Viking runes but has extra characters for Anglo-Saxon sounds not found in Old Norse. You can still find it carved on real surviving objects: the Franks Casket, the Ruthwell Cross, weapons, bone combs.

This translator outputs the Latin-script version since that's what most people study. If you want the runic form, take the translated output and convert it character by character using a Futhorc chart.

Most tools labelled as Old English or Anglo-Saxon translators just throw a few random "thees" and "thous" into modern text and call it done. That's actually Early Modern English, the era of Shakespeare, not Anglo-Saxon. They're a thousand years apart.

This one treats Anglo-Saxon as what it actually is: a West Germanic language with its own grammar, its own alphabet, and its own rhythm. Results won't be perfect translations (no AI ever nails a dead language fully), but they're real attempts at the language, not costumes.

If you want something closer to Shakespeare's time, check the Shakespearean Translator. For the period between Anglo-Saxon and Shakespeare, try the Middle English Translator, the language of Chaucer and the 1300s. If you want the Viking-era cousin language that shaped Anglo-Saxon through contact and raids, the Old Norse Translator covers that directly. And for more on the same language from a pure linguistic angle, the Old English Translator is a sibling page.

For serious study, the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary is the gold standard and has been free online for years. Wikipedia's Old English article is a solid starting point if you want context on the period and the language.