Hans Schabram's examination (1965) of the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary finds forty-one separate words in all parts of speech answering to superbia, superbus, superbe, and superbire. The rules for inclusion in this thesaurus specify that a word stand as a gloss for one of the superbia family or as an equivalent in an Anglo-Saxon translation of a Latin text. However, rare words belonging to one of the four Anglo-Saxon families of superbia terms join the thesaurus without meeting those strict criteria. Anglo-Saxon glossators and translators saw in their source texts superbia words with a strictly restricted meaning and had a native vocabulary that included no matching words with equally restricted fields of meaning. In classical Latin, superbia in a bad sense (I) means “loftiness, haughtiness, pride, arrogance” and in a good sense (II) “lofty spirit, honourable pride” and similarly superbus means both “haughty, proud, arrogant, insolent …” (I) and “proud, superior, excellent, distinguished …” (Lewis and Short 1879). Anglo-Saxon clerics understood superbia as a cardinal or deadly sin, not as an ambiguous term with meanings ranging from sense I to sense II. The apparent semantic precision of the superbia word family in the Latin they glossed or translated seems to have tested the learned in Anglo-Saxon England.

When learned Anglo-Saxons met one of the superbia family in a text they were translating or glossing (or simply reading), they presumably formed an idea of “pride” in attitudes and actions consistent with their cultural backgrounds. An Anglo-Saxon rendering of superbia at the highest level represents pride as denying and rebelling against the ultimate rightful authority. In Genesis B (Krapp 1931), the rebel angel's soliloquy (278–91) creates an Anglo-Saxon locus classicus for superbia, the ultimate manifesto of pride as the chief of the cardinal sins. The rebel angel rejects God's hyldo (282b “grace, favor,” that is a lord's loyalty toward a follower or “loyalty down”) but insists his followers are hold (288a “true, faithful” that is loyal to him as their lord or “loyalty up”). The first of the angels proclaims “ic mæg wesan god swā hē” (283b, “I can be god / a god as well as he”) and closes his meditation “Ne wille ic leng his geongra wurtan” (291b, “I will no longer be his follower”).