Verb prefixes in Middle High German are an area that has yet to be studied in anything more than a patchy and incomplete manner. The present study sets out to give a comprehensive and systematic account of this phenomenon for all verbs, analyzing it from various viewpoints: graphic, morphological and above all functional-semantic. On the basis of a corpus of medieval primary sources structured for periodicity and provenance, the work differs in approach from the grammatical descriptions advanced so far, most of which refer to printed and normalized text editions. As such it provides insights of moment for future grammatographic studies on Middle High German.