For agents

The dictionary, as an MCP server.

Five lookup tools over the same data as the entry pages, for anything that speaks the Model Context Protocol. No key, no account, no writes.

What it is

https://eldertongue.com/mcp is a Model Context Protocol server speaking Streamable HTTP. It is read-only: no tool changes anything, and the server keeps no per-request record beyond a short-lived rate-limit counter. Every result carries the eldertongue.com URL it came from, so an answer can cite the page a reader can open.

Connect

From a shell, for Claude Code and other CLI clients:

claude mcp add --transport http eldertongue https://eldertongue.com/mcp

Clients configured by JSON — Cursor (.cursor/mcp.json), Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json) and the like:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "eldertongue": {
      "url": "https://eldertongue.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

VS Code (.vscode/mcp.json) names the transport explicitly:

{
  "servers": {
    "eldertongue": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://eldertongue.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Any other client that supports Streamable HTTP needs only the URL. A ready-made set of configs lives in the public repository.

Tools

Tool	Pass	Returns
`lookup_headword`	`word`	Senses, IPA and syllables, part of speech, gender, noun declension or verb class, etymology, and the entry page URL.
`inflect`	`word`	The full declension or conjugation table, every form linked to its anchored cell on the entry page.
`identify_form`	`form`	The headwords an inflected form can belong to, with the grammatical reading of each (case, number, person, tense, mood).
`english_to_old_english`	`word`	Old English headwords whose definitions mention a Modern English word, scored, with the entry page URL.
`beowulf_occurrences`	`word`	Every line of Bēowulf that carries the headword: line numbers, line text, spellings used, and a link to the poem line.

Call it without MCP

Each tool has a plain GET mirror, for scripts and for clients that cannot speak MCP. The parameter is word, except for form identification, which takes form:

/api/lookup?word=cyning
/api/inflect?word=gōd
/api/identify?form=cyninges
/api/english?word=king
/api/beowulf?word=hilde
/api/health — service and version

The same surface is described in OpenAPI 3.1, if you would rather generate a client than read this page.

A single call, end to end:

curl -s https://eldertongue.com/mcp \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -H 'accept: application/json, text/event-stream' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call",
       "params":{"name":"lookup_headword","arguments":{"word":"cyning"}}}'

Limits and data

Requests are limited to 120 a minute per IP address; beyond that the server answers 429. Nothing is billed and nothing needs registering.

Results are facts about Old English words, not prose written for this site: the dictionary data comes from Wiktionary contributors via kaikki.org, and the Bēowulf lines from the poem text. Both are used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Cite the eldertongue.com URL each result carries. Problems and corrections go to support@eldertongue.com.

Where it is listed

The server is published in the official MCP registry as io.github.gowinder/eldertongue, and indexed by Glama, which scores tool definitions and endpoint health:

Glama — connector score Official MCP Registry