THE
DICTIONARY STORY
The dictionary does not comes of age
until the Neoclassical period. Why so
late? Why no need earlier?
Because
there was not need to spell correctly.
English
was not a language for serious business anyway.
The earliest dictionaries come about in
the Renaissance why and what were their purposes?
The
enrichment movement created a new vocabulary of hard words that many did not know.
The
vernacular needed to move toward a uniform orthography in order to be recognized
as a respectable medium for England.
Glosses
and Glossaries
The earliest attempts to explain words in
England dates back to the 7th Century.
7th- and 8th-century
marginal glosses in manuscripts
The earliest dictionary-like
tools in English are the Old English glosses, such as one finds in the
Lindisfarne Gospels: Old English "glosses" written above or beside
the Latin text of the Gospels to allow Anglo-Saxon readers easier access to the
Latin text (just as students today might annotate a text of Shakespeare or a
foreign-language text). Sources like the Lindisfarne Gospels were invaluable
for the recovery of Old English by antiquarians.
And Later:
9th century interlinear glosses.
English-Latin
1100 Velum sheets with list of words
glossed for young monks
1200 Alexander Neckham --trilingual
English-Latin-French, De nominibus utensilium
1400 English-Latin, 12,000 words
Proptorium Parvoloriam Sive
Clercorum
1480 Caxton, 52 page, French-English
Vocabulary List
1483 Catholicon, English-Latin 8,000
As early as
1582, in the Elementarie (a list of about 8,000 English words, but with
no definitions), Richard Mulcaster
had called for a dictionary which, in addition to providing for English words
"the right writing, which is incident to the Alphabete, wold open vnto us
therein, both their naturall force, and their proper use." But not until
150 years later, in Nathaniel Bailey's Universal Etymological English
Dictionary (1721), did anyone try to list all the words in the language.
The earliest English dictionaries were not dictionaries at all in the modern
sense, but rather lists of Latin words and their English equivalents or lists
of "hard words" in English.
By end of 16th century, the
listing of words in alphabetical order had been established in Latin-English
dictionaries, and this principle was adopted by makers of English dictionaries.
Some landmarks in early English lexicography (dictionary-making) are:
1558 A,B,C
1570 John Hart, An Orthographie
1580 William Bullokar, Book at Large
1582 Richard Mucaster, The Elementarie,
lists 8000 Hard Words
1596 Edmund Coote, The English Schoole
Master, brief definitions but still
not in alphabetical order
1596 Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium Linguae
Latinae et Anglicanae
Up
to now the groupings were thematic rather than alphabetical. So
1604 Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall ...of
hard usuall English Words, about 2500 words, marked French and Greek loans
1616 John Bullokar, An English Expositor, 5000 words, 1st scientific dictionary
1623 Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionarie, 3 lists of words: Refined; Vulgar; and
Mythology (first to call itself a dictionary)
1656 Thomas Blount, Glossographia: 11,000 entries, 1st to cite sources. Intends his
text to be useful not only to "the more-knowing women and the less-knowing
men" and the unlearned, but also to the "best of scholars" and
"to all such as desire to understand what they read."; girst English
lexicographer to attempt etymology ("true meaning of a word according to
its origin: fr. Greek etymos "true")
1658 Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words, 11,000
words, largest yet, gained in size by adding common words to the ordinary list
of hard words
1676 Elisha Coles, An English Dictionary,
expanded to 25,000 words by adding dialectal entries.
John Kersey, 1702, 1706, 1707, 1708
Development
of an Authoritative Dictionary
In 1730, Nathaniel Bailey
produced his Dictionarium Britannicum. It encompassed 48,000 words and became
the standard English dictionary until Samuel Johnson, using Bailey's work as a
foundation, produced A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Johnson
conceived his plan for the dictionary with the notion of "fixing" the
language.
Nathan Baily, 1730
Although
Johnson is frequently accorded the credit for being the first to devide and
number a lexical item's various senses, the practice can be found in use in
Benjamin Martin's Lingua Britannica Reformata of 1749 and in earlier
bilingual dictionaries. Whatever else Johnson's Dictionary might have
been, it was unquestionably suited to the needs and tastes of his time and his
society, and it was the first to be referred to as "The Dictionary."
Some have
complained that Johnson allowed too much of his own personality to intrude into
his definitions, but the examples usually cited are rather exceptional:
nowise -- This is commonly spoken and written by
ingorant barbarians, noways."
As George Campbell (Philosophy of Rhetoric
1776) later noted, "These ignorant barbarians…are only Pope, and Swift,
and Addison, and Locke, and several others of our most celebrated
writers."
excise -- a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and
adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to
whom excise is paid.
lexicographer -- A writer of dictionaries; a harmless
drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the
signification of words.
oats -- A grain, which in England is generally given
to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
Johnson's Dictionary
was an important touchstone for Noah Webster
in his development of An American Dictionary of the English Language.