Work on a new edition of Orrmulum, the vast 12th century homiletic work surviving in the author’s holograph (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1), and in some parts, lost from MS Junius 1, in a 17th century copy by Jan van Vliet (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 783), has yielded various by-products, such as analyses of Orrm’s scriptural interpretations (Johannesson 2007a,b, 2008a–c, 2012), studies of semantic fields (Johannesson 2006b), variation studies (Johannesson 2000, 2006a), and studies of individual words (Johannesson 2004, 2015). The purpose of the last two papers was to provide alternative interpretations and/or etymologies of a small number of individual words. The proposed paper, by contrast, will adopt a wider perspective of groups of words of different origins. Preparing the glossary for the new edition of Orrmulum has provided an opportunity to take a bird’s-eye view of the lexis used by Orrm in his homiletic work. In this paper I will present some reflections on the status of native English vocabulary, Old Norse borrowings, Old French borrowings, and Middle Dutch borrowings. An analysis of erased (but identifiable) words in the manuscript can give an indication of what kind of words Orrm had second thoughts about and eventually decided to exclude from his text. Orrm occasionally provides comments on the status of words as in (1), where the Scandinavian borrowings brodd ‘shoot’ and blome ‘flower’ were obviously sufficiently integrated to count as examples of ‘ennglissh’.