Regulating English:
the Early Modern Monolingual
English Dictionary
The
material here has been drawn entirely from
Osselton,
N.E. “The Character of the Earliest English dictionaries.” Chosen words:
past and present problems
for dictionary makers. Exeter: University of
Exeter Press, 1995.
[Essay first published in 1990. This is a collection
of reprinted essays. A few points here also come from some of the other essays.
In general, assume that there should be quotation marks around all the text
here.]
Further
resources and reference
Lancashire,
Ian. LEME
online.
[A database of Early Modern lexicons and information
about them. Invaluable: you can search for words that appear in the definitions
too!]
Starnes,
De Witt T. and Gertrude E. Noyes. The English dictionary from Cawdrey to
Johnson 1604-1755.
1946. New ed. and intro. by Gabriele Stein.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991.
For
your next essay
§
if
you like collecting and organizing and focussing things
§
and
if you are interested in issues of ‘authority’
o a dictionary project might
be for you!
§
think
of a very focussed semantic field
§
and
use its treatment in these dictionaries (LEME, EEBO, ECCO)
to illustrate the distinctive features of the dictionaries
Dates
o Cawdrey 1604 the first
monolingual dictionary of English
o but there’s a C16th manuscript
(“the Rawlinson dictionary”) that would probably have predated him if published
o has 337 entries for ‘A’, vs
Cawdrey’s 286
§
moreover,
Cawdrey’s dictionary is ‘A-heavy’
o used an English-Latin
dictionary as a source and has more ‘common’ words
§
e.g.
age, ague
§
and
some phrasal verbs (from Lat. re- )
·
put back, keep back, give back, goe back
Terms
for the genre
§
Cawdrey
1604: A table alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true
writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes, borrowed from the
Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French &c.
§
Bullokar
1616: An English expositor: teaching the interpretation of the
hardest words vsed in our language
§
Cockeram
1623: The English dictionarie: or, an interpreter of hard
English words ... Being a collection of some thousands of words, never
published by any heretofore
§
Blount
1656: Glossographia: or a dictionary, interpreting all such
hard words ... as are now used in our refined English tongue
§
Coles
1676: An
English dictionary explaining the difficult terms that are used in divinity,
husbandry, physick, phylosophy, law, navigation, mathematicks, and other arts
and sciences containing many thousands of hard words (and proper names of
places) more than are in any other English dictionary or expositor : together
with the etymological derivation of them from their proper fountains, whether
Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, or any other language, in a method more
comprehensive, than any that is extant
Title
pages serve as a blurb
§
highlight features
o kinds of words, e.g. “hard words” (but
“usual”, “used” – a practical book!)
o etymologies: “Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
French...” (in order of obscurity?)
o number of words: Bailey 1721 contains “many
Thousand Words more than either Harris, Philips, Kersey,
or any English Dictionary before Extant”
§
identify
author
o anonymous (Cawdrey)
§
Rutland
grammar school master
o initials: E.P. 1658, J.K. 1702
§
Phillips
left university without a degree, hack writer
§
J.K.
perhaps John Kersey, known to have revised Phillips in 1706
o professional
§
“I.B.,
Doctor of Physicke” (Bullokar)
§
“T.B.
of the Inner Temple, Barrester (Blount)
o [philologus in Grk
letters], N. Bailey
§
teacher
and textbook writer
o university graduate: Samuel Johnson, A.M.
§
identify
audience:
o e.g. women, students,
merchants, “the linguistically insecure, baffled by the highly
heterogeneous vocabulary of their native language
§
e.g.
Cawdrey 1604: “for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other
unskilful persons”
§
J.K.
1702: “for the benefit of Young Scholars, Tradesmen, Artificers, and the Female
Sex, who would learn to spell truely”
·
“The
need to cater for this humbler public continues through into the eighteenth
century”
o e.g. upper ranks of
society (or those who’d like to think of themselves as there)
§
Johnson’s
dictionary, based on and illustrated with literary quotations
Alphabetization
used
§
needed explanation in Cawdrey (lifted from one of his sources, Coote’s 1596 English
schoole-maister)
o “If thou be desirous (gentle
Reader) rightly and readily to vnderstand, and to profit by this Table ... then
thou must learne the Alphabet ... Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to
finde, begin with (a) then looke in the beginning of this Table ... if thy word
beginne with (ca) looke in the beginning of the letter (c) but if with (cu)
then looke toward the end of that letter.”
§
not perfect (Cawdrey 12% wrong, successors average 6-8%))
o random error
o printer intervention, e.g.
substitutes impacience for impatience without adjusting the alphabetical sequence
o problem
of what to do with derived forms
§
as separate entries
·
e.g.
Cawdrey puts assigne, appoint, ordaine, before assignation
·
captiue before captiuate
§
bracketed
·
vnitie, } peace, or
·
vnion¸ } concord
o problem of what to do with
variants (orth. or morph.)
§
e.g.
in Cawdrey, {ingine, engine} appear only under ‘I’
§
‘or’
(Phillips 1658)
·
Indocility¸or Indocibility
§
I/J
and U/V conflated in this period
o e.g. Johnson: juxtaposition
precedes ivy
Content
§
new
scholarly (especially) Latinate vocabulary
§
technical
terms: e.g. Bailey “Terms of Art relating to Anatomy, Botany, Physick,
Pharmacy, Surgery ... Confectionary, Carving, Cookery, &c.”
§
slang/cant
o Coles 1676: “save your
Throat from being cut, or, at least, your Pocket from being pick’d”, e.g. “Doxy,
C. a wench”
§
dialect
(unsystematic: “habit”? “sentiment”? contempt?)
o Ray 1674: Collection of
English Words not generally used
o Coles 1676: 3.25% of his
vocabulary, e.g. “Crawly-mawly, Nf. pretty well.”
o Johnson 1755: “kirk an
old word for a church, yet retained in Scotland.” (both obsolete and Scottish!)
§
archaisms
(helping reader of early as well as current literature?)
o e.g. Bullokar and Cockeram
have clepe as a headword
§
encyclopedic
matter
o e.g. Phillips had “names of
classical, historical or biblical interest” for “readers of poetry and polite
letters”
o Coles 1676 had “personal
names and the names of English towns”
§
ordinary
words
o Kersey 1702 first to include
systematically and to state his reasons for it
§
the
assistance it will give to ‘young Scholars, Tradesmen, Artificers, and others,
and particularly, the more ingenious Practitioners of the Female Sex; in
attaining to the true manner of Spelling of such Words, as from time to time
they have occasionally to make use of”: e.g. “above”, “clammy”, “fleece”, “in”,
“large”, “unwise”
o phrasal verbs given first
reasonably full coverage by Johnson
Etymologies
§
occasionally
indicated with a letter, e.g. (g) Greek
o (g) marks some entry-words
of Greek origin (Cawdrey)
o extended to other languages
by Coles 1676
§
root
word
o Blount 1656 sometimes gives
the root word, e.g. Tithing [Sax. Teothung]
o Blount the first to make an
effort to give etymologies
§
first
explicitly etymological dictionary 1689: Gazophylacium Anglicanum 1689
§
first
systematic statement in a general dictionary of immediate source and remoter
analogues (Bailey 1721)
CLERGY (F. ... L.
... Gr)
Size
(number of entries)
Different
sources give quite different numbers (and many of these works ran into multiple
editions with additions). I’ve taken most of these figures from one website.
|
Cawdrey
1604 |
ca
2500 |
|
Bullokar
1616 |
ca
5000 |
|
Blount
1656 |
ca
11,000? |
|
J.K.
1702 |
ca
28,000 |
|
Bailey
1721 |
ca
40,000 |
|
Johnson
1755 |
ca
40,000 |
Sources
Hard-word
dictionaries
§
Latin-English
dictionaries
§
subject-specific
glossaries appended to learned vernacular publications
§
and
specialist dictionaries, glossaries, etc.
§
writers:
o difficult/scientific: Bacon,
Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Blount 1656)
§
“covers
an immense range of topics ... about which popular beliefs might be set right
by the application of the new scientific knowledge”
o literary: Johnson
More
‘ordinary’ words
§
vernacular
textbooks, e.g. spelling books
§
bilingual
dictionaries: English-Latin and perhaps English-French
o Kersey 1702, for the more
‘common’ words
o Johnson 1755: for phrasal
verbs, e.g. call back, for, in, on, out, over, upon
§
literary
authors
o SJ then found literary
quotations containing many of them
Acknowledgement
of sources
§
“plagiarism
was clearly the norm”
§
but
“there are early instances of honest acknowledgment”
o Blount lists about 10
o Bailey and Johnson
acknowledge source of etymologies
§
non-dictionary
sources acknowledged,
o e.g. Lord Bacon and Sir
Thomas Browne
§
Blount
1656 the first
o
e.g.
Chaucer
Prefaces
§
criticize
predecessors
§
before
Martin (1749) and Johnson (1755), less practical guidance on contents and use
§
Johnson’s
o introduction to a dictionary
o
exposition
of lexicographical theory and practice
§ much less optimistic than
the Plan about ‘fixing’ language!
o
had
a grammar (had been found in monolingual dictionaries from Dyche and Pardon
1735 onwards)
o
and
a history of the language (not unknown)
Typographical
strategies
§
contrast
of fonts
o Black
letter + Roman
(Cawdrey, Blount, Kersey-Phillips)
§
edifice,
building (Cawdrey)
§
ebriety (ebrietas) drunkenness (Blount)
o italic + Roman (Phillips, Coles)
§
Edacity, (lat.) a greedy eating, or devouring (Phillips)
o CAPITALS + Roman (Bailey,
Martin)
§
ECHINATE
Seeds [of Plants] are such as are prickly or rough.
o large and small capitals to
distinguish between main and derivative entry-word (Johnson)
§
ECO’NOMY,
{ECONOMICK. ECONOMICAL }.
§
obelisk
or dagger for words of doubtful acceptability
§
ITALIC CAPITALS for unassimilated foreign loanwords (Martin)
Labels
§
the
need to distinguish specialized technical senses was often satisfied
incidentally within the definition
o Operation (Lat) a labouring or
working. ‘Tis frequently used in Chymistry and Surgery, and signifies ...’ (GAN
1707)
§
bracketed
notes (in hunting)
§
letters
(‘c’ for ‘canting’, ‘o’ for ‘old word’, ‘Ch[eshire]’, ‘E[ssex]’, etc.
§
Kersey
major innovator of abbreviated labels
o prefaced a list of 46 to his
1708 dictionary, e.g.
§
‘Sc.’
for Scotch
§
S.L.
= Statute-Law
§
S.T.
for ‘Sea Term’
§
subjective
commentary
o e.g. ‘a barbarous term in
husbandry’
Definitions
§
earliest
used synonyms, often pairing a learned foreign term with a native one
o ignify ‘to burn’
§
aimed
at (though they often fell short of) logical or insertible equivalents
o quotidian done daily, that happens every
day, ordinary (Blount 1656)
§
interconnected
(unique to Coles 1676)
o Evade, l. to make an
Evasion, an escape, shift.
§
“discourse
approach”
o Becalm’d, is when the Water is so
very smooth, that the Ship has scarce any Motion, or moves but slowly” (Glossographia
Anglicana Nova 1707)
§
numbered
definitions presented in a predetermined order (Martin 1749)
o chronologically so as to
illustrate the semantic development of the word (Johnson 1755)
Illustrative
quotations
§
Johnson
the first to derive definitions from and illustrate them with quotations fro
major writers of the preceding two centuries
o Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton,
Addison, Pope, Bacon account for almost half the quotations
Grammar
§
word
class:
o Dyche and Pardon (1735) initiated
the modern convention of including a note of word class (v for verb, a
for adjective, etc.) for every entry
§
morphology
little treated before 18th century
o J.K. 1702 seems to be the
first to enter noun plurals (mice) and verb forms (rang)
Pronunciation
§
little
before the 18th century
o Coles prefixed the usual
list of homophones e.g. ware wear were
§
word
stress
o Bailey the first to
§
added
guidance on syllabification
o Dyche and Pardon 1735;
Martin
§
little
by Johnson
o not yet an effective method
for representing it