dictionary

From Classical times to 1604

In the long perspective of human evolutionary development, dictionaries have been known through only a slight fraction of language history. People at first simply talked without having any authoritative backing from reference books. A short Akkadian word list, from central Mesopotamia, has survived from the 7th century bce. The Western tradition of dictionary making began among the Greeks, although not until the language had changed so much that explanations and commentaries were needed. After a 1st-century-ce lexicon by Pamphilus of Alexandria, many lexicons were compiled in Greek, the most important being those of the Atticists in the 2nd century, that of Hesychius of Alexandria in the 5th century, and that of Photius and the Suda in the Middle Ages. (The Atticists were compilers of lists of words and phrases thought to be in accord with the usage of the Athenians.)

Because Latin was a much-used language of great prestige well into modern times, its monumental dictionaries were important and later influenced English lexicography. In the 1st century bce, Marcus Terentius Varro wrote the treatise De lingua Latina; the extant books of its section of etymology are valuable for their citations from Latin poets. At least five medieval Scholastics—Papias the Lombard, Alexander Neckam, Johannes de Garlandia (John Garland), Hugo of Pisa, and Giovanni Balbi of Genoa—turned their attention to dictionaries. The mammoth work of Ambrogio Calepino, published at Reggio (now Reggio nell’Emilia, Italy) in 1502, incorporating several other languages besides Latin, was so popular that calepin came to be an ordinary word for a dictionary. A Lancashire will of 1568 contained the provision: “I will that Henry Marrecrofte shall have my calepin and my paraphrases.” This is an early instance of the tendency that, several centuries later, caused people to say, “Look in Johnson” or “Look in Webster.”

Because language problems within a single language do not loom so large to ordinary people as those that arise in the learning of a different language, the interlingual dictionaries developed early and had great importance. The corporation records of Boston, Lincolnshire, have the following entry for the year 1578:

That a dictionary shall be bought for the scholars of the Free School, and the same book to be tied in a chain, and set upon a desk in the school, whereunto any scholar may have access, as occasion shall serve.

The origin of the bilingual lists can be traced to a practice of the early Middle Ages, that of writing interlinear glosses—explanations of difficult words—in manuscripts. It is but a step for these glosses to be collected together at the back of a manuscript and then for the various lists—glossaries—to be assembled in another manuscript. Some of these have survived from the 7th and 8th centuries—and in some cases they preserve the earliest recorded forms in English.

The first bilingual glossary to find its way into print was a French-English vocabulary for the use of travelers, printed in England by William Caxton without a title page, in 1480. The words and expressions appeared in parallel columns on 26 leaves. Next came a Latin-English vocabulary by a noted grammarian, John Stanbridge, published by Richard Pynson in 1496 and reprinted frequently. But far more substantial in character was an English-Latin vocabulary called the Promptorius puerorum (“Storehouse [of words] for Children”) brought out by Pynson in 1499. It is better known under its later title of Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum (“Storehouse for Children or Clerics”) commonly attributed to Geoffrey the Grammarian (Galfridus Grammaticus), a Dominican friar of Norfolk, who is thought to have composed it about 1440.

The next important dictionary to be published was an English-French one by John (or Jehan) Palsgrave in 1530, Lesclaircissement de la langue francoise (“Elucidation of the French Tongue”). Palsgrave was a tutor of French in London, and a letter has survived showing that he arranged with his printer that no copy should be sold without his permission,

lest his profit by teaching the French tongue might be minished by the sale of the same to such persons as, besides him, were disposed to study the said tongue.

A Welsh-English dictionary by William Salesbury in 1547 brought another language into requisition: A Dictionary in English and Welsh. The encouragement of Henry VIII was responsible for an important Latin-English dictionary that appeared in 1538 from the hand of Sir Thomas Elyot. Thomas Cooper enlarged it in subsequent editions and in 1565 brought out a new work based upon it—Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (“Thesaurus of the Roman Tongue and the British”). A hundred years later John Aubrey, in Brief Lives, recorded Cooper’s misfortune while compiling it:

His wife…was irreconcilably angry with him for sitting-up late at night so, compiling his Dictionary….When he had half-done it, she had the opportunity to get into his study, took all his pains out in her lap, and threw it into the fire, and burnt it. Well, for all that, that good man had so great a zeal for the advancement of learning, that he began it again, and went through with it to that perfection that he hath left it to us, a most useful work.

More important still was Richard Huloet’s work of 1552, Abecedarium Anglo-Latinum, for it contained a greater number of English words than had before appeared in any similar dictionary. In 1556 appeared the first edition by John Withals of A Short Dictionary for Young Beginners, which gained greater circulation (to judge by the frequency of editions) than any other book of its kind. Many other lexicographers contributed to the development of dictionaries. Certain dictionaries were more ambitious and included a number of languages, such as John Baret’s work of 1573, An Alveary, or Triple Dictionary, in English, Latin, and French. In his preface Baret acknowledged that the work was brought together by his students in the course of their exercises, and the title Alveary was to commemorate their “beehive” of industry. The first rhyming dictionary, by Peter Levens, was produced in 1570—Manipulus Vocabulorum. A Dictionary of English and Latin Words, Set Forth in Such Order, as None Heretofore Hath Been.

The interlingual dictionaries had a far greater stock of English words than were to be found in the earliest all-English dictionaries, and the compilers of the English dictionaries, strangely enough, never took full advantage of these sources. It may be surmised, however, that people in general sometimes consulted the interlingual dictionaries for the English vocabulary. The anonymous author of The Art of English Poesy, thought to be George Puttenham, wrote in 1589 concerning the adoption of southern speech as the standard:

herein we are already ruled by th’ English Dictionaries and other books written by learned men, and therefore is needeth none other direction in that behalf.

The mainstream of English lexicography is the word list explained in English. The first known English-English glossary grew out of the desire of the supporters of the Reformation that even the most humble Englishman should be able to understand the Scriptures. William Tyndale, when he printed the Pentateuch on the Continent in 1530, included “a table expounding certain words.” The following entries (quoted here with unmodernized spellings) are typical:

• Albe, a longe garment of white lynen.
• Boothe, an housse made of bowes.
• Brestlappe or brestflappe, is soche a flappe as thou seist in the brest or a cope.
• Consecrate, to apoynte a thinge to holy uses.
• Dedicate, purifie or sanctifie.
• Firmament: the skyes.
• Slyme was…a fattenesse that osed out of the erth lykeunto tarre / And thou mayst call it cement / if thou wilt.
• Tabernacle, an house made tentwise, or as a pauelion.
• Vapor / a dewymiste / as the smoke of a sethynge pott.

Spelling reformers long had a deep interest in producing English dictionaries. In 1569 one such reformer, John Hart, lamented the greatness of the “disorders and confusions” of spelling. But a few years later the phonetician William Bullokar promised to produce such a work and stated, “A dictionary and grammar may stay our speech in a perfect use for ever.”

Schoolmasters also had a strong interest in the development of dictionaries. In 1582 Richard Mulcaster, of the Merchant Taylors’ school and later of St. Paul’s, expressed the wish that some learned and laborious man “would gather all the words which we use in our English tongue,” and in his book commonly referred to as The Elementary he listed about 8,000 words, without definitions, in a section called “The General Table.” Another schoolmaster, Edmund Coote, of Bury St. Edmund’s, in 1596 brought out The English Schoolmaster, Teaching All His Scholars of What Age Soever the Most Easy Short & Perfect Order of Distinct Reading & True Writing Our English Tongue, with a table that consisted of about 1,400 words, sorted out by different typefaces on the basis of etymology. This is important, because what is known as the “first” English dictionary, eight years later, was merely an adaptation and enlargement of Coote’s table.

From 1604 to 1828

In 1604 at London appeared the first purely English dictionary to be issued as a separate work, titled A Table Alphabetical, Containing and Teaching the True Writing and Understanding of Hard Usual English Words, Borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or French &c., by Robert Cawdrey, who had been a schoolmaster at Oakham, Rutland, about 1580 and in 1604 was living at Coventry. He had the collaboration of his son Thomas, a schoolmaster in London. This work contained about 3,000 words but was so dependent upon three sources that it can rightly be called a plagiarism. The basic outline was taken over from Coote’s work of 1596, with 87 percent of his word list adopted. Further material was taken from the Latin-English dictionary by Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (1588). But the third source is most remarkable. In 1599 a Dutchman known only as A.M. translated from Latin into English a famous medical work by Oswald Gabelkhouer, The Boock of Physicke, published at Dort, in the Netherlands. As he had been away from England for many years and had forgotten much of his English, A.M. sometimes merely put English endings on Latin words. When friends told him that Englishmen would not understand them, he compiled a list of them, explained by a simpler synonym, and put it at the end of the book. Samples are:

Puluerisated, reade beaten; Frigifye, reade coole; Madefye, reade dipp; Calefye, reade heat; Circumligate, reade binde; Ebulliated, read boyled.

Thus, the fumblings of a Dutchman who knew little English (in fact, his errata) were poured into Cawdrey’s word list. But other editions of Cawdrey were called for—a second in 1609, a third in 1613, and a fourth in 1617.

The next dictionary, by John Bullokar, An English Expositor, is first heard of on May 25, 1610, when it was entered in the Stationers’ Register (which established the printer’s right to it), but it was not printed until six years later. Bullokar introduced many archaisms, marked with a star (“only used of some ancient writers, and now grown out of use”), such as aye, eld, enewed, fremd, gab, and glee. The work had 14 editions, the last as late as 1731.

Still in the tradition of hard words was the next work, in 1623, by Henry Cockeram, the first to have the word dictionary in its title: The English Dictionary; or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words. It added many words that have never appeared anywhere else—adpugne, adstupiate, bulbitate, catillate, fraxate, nixious, prodigity, vitulate, and so on. Much fuller than its predecessors was Thomas Blount’s work of 1656, Glossographia; or, A Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words…As Are Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue. He made an important forward step in lexicographical method by collecting words from his own reading that had given him trouble, and he often cited the source. Much of Blount’s material was appropriated two years later by Edward Phillips, a nephew of the poet John Milton, for a work called The New World of English Words, and Blount castigated him bitterly.

Thus far, the English lexicographers had all been men who made dictionaries in their leisure time or as an avocation, but in 1702 appeared a work by the first professional lexicographer, John Kersey the Younger. This work, A New English Dictionary, incorporated much from the tradition of spelling books and discarded most of the fantastic words that had beguiled earlier lexicographers. As a result, it served the reasonable needs of ordinary users of the language. Kersey later produced some bigger works, but all these were superseded in the 1720s when Nathan Bailey, a schoolmaster in Stepney, issued several innovative works. In 1721 he produced An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, which for the rest of the century was more popular even than Samuel Johnson’s. A supplement in 1727 was the first dictionary to mark accents for pronunciation. Bailey’s imposing Dictionarium Britannicum of 1730 was used by Johnson as a repository during the compilation of the monumental dictionary of 1755.

Many literary men felt the inadequacy of English dictionaries, particularly in view of the continental examples. The Crusca Academy, of Florence, founded in 1582, brought out its Vocabolario at Venice in 1612, filled with copious quotations from Italian literature. The French Academy produced its dictionary in 1694, but two other French dictionaries were actually more scholarly—that of César-Pierre Richelet in 1680 and that of Antoine Furetière in 1690. In Spain the Royal Spanish Academy, founded in 1713, produced its Diccionario de la lengua Castellana (1726–39) in six thick volumes. The foundation work of German lexicography, by Johann Leonhard Frisch, Teutsch-Lateinisches Wörterbuch, in 1741, freely incorporated quotations in German. The Russian Academy of Arts (St. Petersburg) published the first edition of its dictionary somewhat later, from 1789 to 1794. Both the French and the Russian academies arranged the first editions of their dictionaries in etymological order but changed to alphabetical order in the second editions.

In England, in 1707, the antiquary Humphrey Wanley set down in a list of “good books wanted,” which he hoped the Society of Antiquaries would undertake: “A dictionary for fixing the English language, as the French and Italian.” A number of noted authors made plans to fulfill this aim (Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and others), but it remained for a promising poet and critic, Samuel Johnson, to bring such a project to fulfillment. Five leading booksellers of London banded together to support his undertaking, and a contract was signed on June 18, 1746. Next year Johnson’s Plan was printed, a prospectus of 34 pages, consisting of a discussion of language that can still be read as a masterpiece in its judicious consideration of linguistic problems.

With the aid of six amanuenses to copy quotations, Johnson read widely in the literature up to his time and gathered the central word-stock of the English language. He included about 43,500 words (a few more than the number in Bailey), but they were much better selected and represented the keen judgment of a man of letters. He was sympathetic to the desire of that age to “fix” the language, but he realized as he went ahead that “language is the work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be derived.” At most, he felt that he could curb “the lust for innovation.”

The chief glory of Johnson’s dictionary was its 118,000 illustrative quotations. No doubt some of these were included for their beauty, but mostly they served as the basis for his sense discriminations. No previous lexicographer had the temerity to divide the verb take, transitive, into 113 senses and the intransitive into 21 more. The definitions often have a quaint ring to modern readers because the science of the age was either not well developed or was not available to him. But mostly the definitions show a sturdy common sense, except when Johnson used long words sportively. His etymologies reflect the state of philology in his age. Usually they were an improvement on those of his predecessors, because he had as a guide the Etymologicum Anglicanum of Franciscus Junius the Younger, as edited by Edward Lye, which became available in 1743 and which provided guidance for the important Germanic element of the language.

Four editions of the Dictionary were issued during Johnson’s lifetime; in particular the fourth, in 1773, received much personal care in revision. The Dictionary retained its supremacy for many decades and received lavish, although not universal, praise; some would-be rivals were bitter in criticism. A widely heralded work of the 1780s and 1790s was the projected dictionary of Herbert Croft, in a manuscript of 200 quarto volumes, that was to be called The Oxford English Dictionary. Croft was, however, unable to get it into print.

The practice of marking word stress was taken over from the spelling books by Bailey in his Dictionary of 1727, but a full-fledged pronouncing dictionary was not produced until 1757, by James Buchanan; his was followed by those of William Kenrick (1773), William Perry (1775), Thomas Sheridan (1780), and John Walker (1791), whose decisions were regarded as authoritative, especially in the United States.

The attention to dictionaries was thoroughly established in American schools in the 18th century. Benjamin Franklin, in 1751, in his pamphlet “Idea of the English School,” said, “Each boy should have an English dictionary to help him over difficulties.” The master of an English grammar school in New York in 1771, Hugh Hughes, announced: “Every one of this Class will have Johnson’s Dictionary in Octavo.” These were imported from England, because the earliest dictionary printed in the United States was in 1788, when Isaiah Thomas of Worcester, Massachusetts, issued an edition of Perry’s Royal Standard English Dictionary. The first dictionary compiled in America was A School Dictionary by Samuel Johnson, Jr. (not a pen name), printed in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1798. Another, by Caleb Alexander, was called The Columbian Dictionary of the English Language (1800) and on the title page claimed that “many new words, peculiar to the United States,” were inserted. It received abuse from critics who were not yet ready for the inclusion of American words.

In spite of such attitudes, Noah Webster, already well known for his spelling books and political essays, embarked on a program of compiling three dictionaries of different sizes that included Americanisms. In his announcement on June 4, 1800, he titled the largest one A Dictionary of the American Language. He brought out his small dictionary for schools, the Compendious, in 1806 but then engaged in a long course of research into the relation of languages, in order to strengthen his etymologies. At last, in 1828, at age 70, he published his masterwork, in two thick volumes, with the title An American Dictionary of the English Language. His change of title reflects his growing conservatism and his recognition of the fundamental unity of the English language. His selection of the word list and his well-phrased definitions made his work superior to previous works, although he did not give illustrative quotations but merely cited the names of authors. The dictionary’s worth was recognized, although Webster himself was always at the centre of a whirlpool of controversy.

Since 1828

It was Webster’s misfortune to be superseded in his philology in the very decade that his masterpiece came out. He had spent many years in compiling a laborious “Synopsis” of 20 languages, but he lacked an awareness of the systematic relationships in the Indo-European family of languages. Germanic scholars such as Franz Bopp and Rasmus Rask had developed a rigorous science of “comparative philology,” and a new era of dictionary making was called for. Even as early as 1812, Franz Passow had published an essay in which he set forth the canons of a new lexicography, stressing the importance of the use of quotations arranged chronologically in order to exhibit the history of each word. The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, developed these theories in their preparations for the Deutsches Wörterbuch in 1838. The first part of it was printed in 1852, but the end was not reached until more than a century later, in 1960. French scholarship was worthily represented by Maximilien-Paul-Émile Littré, who began working on his Dictionnaire de la langue française in 1844, but, with interruptions of the Revolutions of 1848 and his philosophical studies, he did not complete it until 1873.

Among British scholars the historical outlook took an important step forward in 1808 in the work of John Jamieson on the language of Scotland. Because he did not need to consider the “classical purity” of the language, he included quotations of humble origin; in his Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, his use of “mean” sources marked a turning point in the history of lexicography. Even as late as 1835 the critic Richard Garnett said that “the only good English dictionary we possess is Dr. Jamieson’s Scottish one.” Another collector, James Jermyn, showed by his publications between 1815 and 1848 that he had the largest body of quotations assembled before that of The Oxford English Dictionary. Charles Richardson was also an industrious collector, presenting his dictionary, from 1818 on, distributed alphabetically throughout the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana (vol. 14 to 25) and then reissued as a separate work in 1835–37. Richardson was a disciple of the benighted John Horne Tooke, whose 18th-century theories long held back the development of philology in England. Richardson excoriated Noah Webster for ignoring “the learned elders of lexicography” such as John Minsheu (whose Guide into the Tongues appeared in 1617), Gerhard Johannes Vossius (who published his Etymologicum linguae Latinae in 1662), and Franciscus Junius (Etymologicum Anglicanum, written before 1677). Richardson did collect a rich body of illustrative quotations, sometimes letting them show the meaning without a definition, but his work was largely a monument of misguided industry that met with the neglect it deserved.

Scholars more and more felt the need for a full historical dictionary that would display the English language in accordance with the most rigorous scientific principles of lexicography. The Philological Society, founded in 1842, established an “Unregistered Words Committee,” but, upon hearing two papers by Richard Chenevix Trench in 1857—“On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries”—the society changed its plan to the making of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Forward steps were taken under two editors, Herbert Coleridge and Frederick James Furnivall, until, in 1879, James Augustus Henry Murray, a Scot known for his brilliance in philology, was engaged as editor. A small army of voluntary readers were inspirited to contribute quotation slips, which reached the number of 5,000,000 in 1898, and no doubt 1,000,000 were added after that. Only 1,827,306 of them were used in print. The copy started going to the printer in 1882; Part I was finished in 1884. Later, three other editors were added, each editing independently with his own staff—Henry Bradley, from the north of England, in 1888, William Alexander Craigie, another Scot, in 1901, and Charles Talbut Onions, the only “Southerner,” in 1914. So painstaking was the work that it was not finished until 1928, in more than 15,500 pages with three long columns each. An extraordinary high standard was maintained throughout. The work was reprinted, with a supplement, in 12 volumes in 1933 with the title The Oxford English Dictionary, and as the OED it has been known ever since. In 1989 a second edition, known as the OED2, was published in 20 volumes.

In the United States, lexicographical activity has been unceasing since 1828. In the middle years of the 19th century, a “war of the dictionaries” was carried on between the supporters of Webster and those of his rival, Joseph Emerson Worcester. To a large extent this was a competition between publishers who wished to preempt the market in the lower schools, but literary people took sides on the basis of other issues. In particular, the contentious Webster had gained a reputation as a reformer of spelling and a champion of American innovations while the quiet Worcester followed traditions.

In 1846 Worcester brought out an important new work, A Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language, which included many neologisms of the time, and in the next year Webster’s son-in-law, Chauncey Allen Goodrich, edited an improved American Dictionary of the deceased Webster. In this edition the Webster interests were taken over by an aggressive publishing firm, the G. & C. Merriam Co. (See Merriam-Webster dictionary.) Their agents were very active in the “war of the dictionaries” and sometimes secured an order, by decree of a state legislature, for their book to be placed in every schoolhouse of the state. Worcester’s climactic edition of 1860, A Dictionary of the English Language, gave him the edge in the “war,” and the poet and critic James Russell Lowell declared: “From this long conflict Dr. Worcester has unquestionably come off victorious.” The Merriams, however, brought out their answer in 1864, popularly called “the unabridged,” with etymologies supplied by a famous German scholar, Karl August Friedrich Mahn. Thereafter, the Worcester series received no major reediting, and its faltering publishers allowed it to pass into history.

One of the best English dictionaries ever compiled was issued in 24 parts from 1889 to 1891 as The Century Dictionary, edited by William Dwight Whitney. It contained much encyclopaedic material but bears comparison even with the OED. Isaac Kauffman Funk, in 1893, brought out A Standard Dictionary of the English Language, its chief innovation being the giving of definitions in the order of their importance, not the historical order.

Thus, at the turn of the new century, the United States had four reputable dictionaries—Webster’s, Worcester’s (already becoming moribund), the Century, and Funk’s Standard (see Funk & Wagnalls Dictionaries). England was also well served by many (the original dates given here), including John Ogilvie (1850), P. Austin Nuttall (1855), Robert Gordon Latham (1866, reediting Todd’s Johnson of 1818), Robert Hunter (1879), and Charles Annandale (1882).