This list presents some 500 Old English words which could be regarded as literary core vocabulary. Some of the words are among the most frequent in Old English literature; some are of particular importance on account of their literary or linguistic usage. The reference ‘poet.’ signals predominant usage of a word in poetry. The cognates in a number of related languages are intended to make memorisation of the words easier. A word signalled as ‘hapax legomenon’ is found only once in the entire Old English corpus, and was possibly coined for the passage in question.