from words that we know, once their spelling has been modernized, they can be understood - with the following caveats.
In Wycliffe's Bible, you will encounter familiar words in unfamiliar settings: "and" in place of "also"; "charity" in place of "love"; "clarity" and "clearness" in place of "glory"; "deem" in place of "judge"; "defoul" in place of "defile"; "doom" in place of "judgement"; "dread" in place of "fear"; "either" in place of "or"; "enhance" in place of "exalt"; "health" in place of "salvation" or "deliverance" (and also "victory"); "take" in place of "receive"; "wed" in place of "pledge"; and so forth. Consult a good dictionary. Even as currently defined, these words remain relevant in their particular context. Their use here breathes new life into familiar passages and brings fresh insight and illumination.
However, some words that we recognize have significantly changed definition in the intervening six centuries (in most cases, their meanings have become more specialized, less inclusive, than they were before). Reading the original text, these words sound jarring to our ears and appear out of place. Confusion would result if they were retained in Wycliffe's Bible. So different words were substituted, words whose definitions have remained constant over the centuries, are conducive to the context, and aid, rather than hinder, passage flow. Of vital importance, almost all of the substitution words used in Wycliffe's Bible were already present in the original text (some were previously noted above in the list of doublets of archaic and modern words); many are given as alternate renderings by the Wycliffe and Purvey themselves (either in italics or in another verse dealing with the same subject matter).
The "in-house" substitution words used include: arms (for "armours"); at once (for "anon", not the more modern "by and by"); basin (for "cup", and for "vial", as corrected in glosses citing the Hebrew text); beam (for "tree"); box tree (for "beech tree", as corrected in glosses citing the Hebrew text); cause to stumble (for "sclaundre"); cave (for "swallow" as a noun); chamber (for "treasury"); chiefs (for "corners"); curtains (for "tents"); denounce (for "defame"); depraved (for "shrewide"); destroy (for "lose"); destroyed (for "lost"); face (for "cheer"); feeble and frail (for "sick"); foreyard (for "hall"); half (for "middle"); hinder (for "let"!); hooks (for "heads" of pillars); host (for "strength"); hosts (for "virtues"); joined (for "applied"); knowing (for "cunning"); let go (for "leave" and for "left"); lookers (for "tooters"); loves (for "teats"); lie and lying (for "leasing"); mad (for "wood"); meek (for "debonair"); meekness (for "debonairness"); one (for "to" and for "toon"); only (for "properly"); own (for "proper"); pieces (for "plates"); pit (for "lake" and for "swallow" as a noun); posts (for "fronts" and for "trees"); remember (for "record"); remnant (for "relief"); send away (for "leave"); sent away (for "left"); servant (for "child"); servants (for "children"); species (for "spices"); spoon (for "mortar", as corrected in glosses citing the Hebrew text); stick (for "tree"); stranger or visitor (for "pilgrim"); strength or power (for "virtue"); strengthened (for "comforted"); strong hold (for "strength" and for "strengthening"); stumble (for "offend"); swallow (for "to sop up"); table (for "board"); tent (for "roof"); tents (for "castles"); timber (for "tree"); turn/ed again (for "convert" and "converted"/"return" and "returned"); vessel (for "gallon"); watch (for "wake"); watcher (for "waiter" and for "waker"); a weigh, that is, a balance or scales (for "a peis"); to weigh and weight (for "peise"); well (for "lake" and for "pit"); wild (for "wood"); wood (for "tree"); young (for "birds"); young man (for "child"); and young men (for "children"). All of these substitution words are frequently found in the original text. Ten other substitutions were used which are not found in the original text: boy (for "child"); cloak (for "cloth", the singular of "clothes"); consecrate/d (for "make sacred" and "made sacred", though "consecration" is found); drowned (for "drenched"); firm (for "sad"); naturally (for "kindly"); physician (for "leech"); pledge (for "wed"); and promise (for "behest").
This seems quite a list, about 70 individual substitution words in all. But in total, they were used about 500 times. That is, out of over 700,000 words in Wycliffe's Bible, less than 1/10th of 1% of them are substitution words. Many of these words were used as substitutions five times or less. So when you read any of these words (with the exception of the final ten), almost all of the time they are there in the original text. Substitution words were only used to aid comprehension and were kept to an absolute minimum.
Other Minor Modifications
To aid comprehension and readability, two separate words in the "Wycliffe Bible" are often joined together in Wycliffe's Bible. Examples include: "in+to", "to+day", "-+self", "-+selves", "no+thing", and a few others. Conversely, and for the same reasons of comprehension and readability, many unfamiliar compound nouns found in the WB are hyphenated in Wycliffe's Bible. For example, "a3enrisynge" became "again-rising" ("resurrection"), "a3enstondynge" became "against-standing" ("standing against" or "opposing"), "a3einseiyng" became "against-saying" ("contradicting"), etc. It can also be helpful to reverse the order of hyphenated words when reading them, so "again-rising" can be read "rising again", "against-stand" can be read "stand against", "against-said" can be read "said against", and so on.
Occasionally a prefix or suffix was added to a root word to aid comprehension: "ac" to "knowledge"; "al" to "together"; "be" to "gat", "get", and "loved"; "con" to "strained"; "di" to "minished"; "en" to "close", "compass", "dure", "during", "gender", and "grave"; "re" to "quite"; "sur" to "passingly" and "ly" to "most". These prefixes and the suffix are found in abundance in the original text, as are the words "altogether", "begat", "beget", "constrained", "diminished", "enclose", "endure", "enduring", "engender", and "engrave".
Inconsequential prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns ("a", "the", "and", "selves", etc.) not found in particular "Later Version" phrases, but present in the same "Early Version" phrases, were occasionally added to the text of Wycliffe's Bible to aid comprehension and improve passage flow. They appear in square brackets, "[ ]". Such words were also added even when not found in the comparable "Early Version" verses; these inserts appear in parentheses, "( )".
Parentheses were also used to contain phrases and even entire verses which were re-ordered, re-punctuated, and, sometimes, re-worded, to aid comprehension and readability. Working with Hebrew and Latin sources, the translators produced a highly literal text that is often convoluted and confusing in English. So an effort was made to make better sense out of these passages by putting the available words (or, at times, different, but more accurate words,) into a more fluent order, with more appropriate punctuation. But this is only done with words that are found within parentheses. Such re-working always appears after the original unaltered text, and can easily be ignored, if so desired.
Punctuation overall follows the original text. Occasionally a comma was inserted to aid readability. For chapters of repetitive lists of names, numbers, places, or temple accoutrements (such as those found in Numbers, Ezra, Nehemiah, and 1st Chronicles), verses were made consistent with one another. To accomplish this, commas and semi-colons were sometimes interchanged. As well, in various Psalms, it seems that semi-colons were employed to aid in oral presentation (perhaps to indicate a significant pause for breath), for their usage does not follow grammar found elsewhere in the text. So sometimes commas were substituted here. The occasional interchange of commas and semi-colons in these books aids comprehension and improves passage flow, but does not alter the meaning of any verse.
To sum up: More than 98% of the words found in Wycliffe's Old Testament, and 95% of the words that you read in Wycliffe's New Testament, are modernized spellings of the original words found in the 14th century manuscript. Less than 2% of the words in the Old Testament, and less than 5% in the New Testament, are "replacement words", that is, appropriate words chosen to replace obsolete or "dead" words. Almost all of these replacements in the Old Testament - about 100 individual words along with their various forms and tenses - and about three-quarters of the replacements in the New Testament, are found in the original text. As well, about 500 times throughout all of Wycliffe's Bible (not even 1 word for each page of this book), a word more conducive to the context was substituted for another whose meaning had radically changed over the intervening 600 years. Almost all of the substitution words (about 70 in all) were taken from elsewhere in the original text.
Ultimately,
