the English language from about 1100 to about 1450: main dialects are Kentish, Southwestern (West Saxon), East Midland (which replaced West Saxon as the chief literary form and developed into Modern English), West Midland, and Northern (from which the Scots of Lowland Scotland and other modern dialects developed)
Abbreviation: ME. Compare Old English, Modern English
Middle English in American English
the English language as written and spoken between c. 1100 and c. 1500, preceded by Old English and followed by Early Modern English: it is characterized by the loss of grammatical gender and most of the inflectional endings of Old English, by the emergence of a syntax based on word order and function words, by the simplification of the pronominal system,and by extensive vocabulary borrowings from French, Latin, and Low German sources
Examples of 'Middle English' in a sentence
Middle English
I had to work with photocopies (white on black, barely legible, library-use-only) of the Middle English manuscripts.