Perhaps, too, 'nama' can be taken to mean 'name', and 'comon' to 'come'. Some other words like 'asked', for example, have managed to survive, but in an altered form, in this case, 'axode', 'how' as 'hu', 'rightly' as 'rightlice', 'angels' as 'engla'. Some other words have unfortunately vanished without trace from the old English lexicon, and they are 'eft' which meant 'again', 'oeode' which meant 'people or nation', 'gehatene' which meant 'called or named'. The recognition of most of these words may not be possible for an average person, unless he has studied Old English as a subject, and this is made especially difficult because of the existence of two special characters in the language: 'þ', called 'thorn,' and 'ð', called 'edh,' which served in Old English to represent the sounds that are now spelled with ''. .

             Another important fact is that at that time, in the tenth century, the pronoun system did not yet include the third person plural forms that began with 'th', and instead, 'hi' appears wherever 'they' is supposed to be used. Yet another aspect of Old English during the tenth century, which is no longer in popular existence today, although not completely unknown, is that the subject and the verb are inverted after an adverb, and this means that a sentence would be written as 'then said he', and 'which they from came'. The inflections that were very prominent in Old English in the tenth century too became gradually impractical, as seen in how nouns, adjectives, and even the definite article were inflected for gender, case, and number in Old English. (What are the origins of the English language?) .

             Many common words used in Modern English today are in fact words that have been inherited from Old English, and are also direct descendants of ancient 'Proto-Indo-European terms. For example, some basic words such as 'fire and water' have been used continuously for more than six thousand years, as the English language developed from the Proto-Indo-European.