Follow the spelling through the years, one published dataset at a time.
No official statistics are imported for this spelling. No statistical dataset covering this spelling has been imported yet. See data coverage.
04 / Through time
History
Historical scholarship
Passages quoted verbatim from public-domain reference works. They reflect the scholarship of their time, not current consensus, and may use obsolete spellings.
1884From the archives
Alberich— “elf king”
…Otnit was about to pick him up, but received from him a tremendous blow, and after a sharp fight came to terms, and thenceforth he assisted him in his enterprise, gave him magic armour, and assisted him to gain the lady. Much of this story is repeated in the French romance of _Huon de Bourdeaux_, where Auberon, as he is there called, gives the knight an ivory horn wherewith to summon him to his aid in an emergency, and thus arose the English Oberon, the elf-rik or king, the…
Read the full historical passageShow shorter excerpt
…Otnit was about to pick him up, but received from him a tremendous blow, and after a sharp fight came to terms, and thenceforth he assisted him in his enterprise, gave him magic armour, and assisted him to gain the lady. Much of this story is repeated in the French romance of _Huon de Bourdeaux_, where Auberon, as he is there called, gives the knight an ivory horn wherewith to summon him to his aid in an emergency, and thus arose the English Oberon, the elf-rik or king, the graceful but petulant fairy whom Drayton marries to the Irish Mab, and Shakespeare to the Greek Titania. He had his human namesakes, too; Alberich was in fashion as a Frank name, as Ælfric was as a Saxon; and the Domesday Book shows that while we had plenty of the latter native form, Edward the Confessor had already imported two specimens of ‘Albericus comes,’ and these or their sons contracted into Aubrey, which was known to fame as almost hereditary among the De Veres, earls of Oxford.…
Wiktionary text: CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikidata: CC0. Commons recordings retain their individual file licences. Complete attribution is available in each group above and alongside each chart.