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n In addition to encyclopaedias, dictionaries are alsonarranged alphabetically. It appears to be an eminently sensible method ofnpresenting the words –providing, of course, you can spell the word you arenlooking for in the first place. This is one of the reasons that dictionariesnwere originally made; when books were hand-written the spelling followed thenorthography known to each particular scribe. With the introduction of printing,nit soon became apparent that a standard method of spelling was needed. WilliamnCaxton is credited with introducing printing into England in 1476, and althoughnhe was basically a translator Caxton put his name to many of the works henproduced.
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nHe noted in the preface to the Eneydos, that some merchantsnhad landed on the Kent side of the Thames and wanted to buy some eggs. Thenmerchant asked for ‘eggys’, but the stallholder told him she could notnunderstand him, as she didn’t speak French. This angered the merchant, as hencouldn’t speak French either but still wanted some ‘egges’. The problem was solvednwhen another woman intervened, saying what he wanted was ‘eyren’, and thenstallholder then said that she “…vnderstood hym wel”. If confusion existed innthe same city, imagine the situation countrywide, with regional variations,ndialects and local idiosyncrasies. Learned works were still written in Latin,nand the earliest ‘dictionaries’ were word-lists or glossaries, first from Latinnto English, then English to Latin.
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| Catholicon Anglicum – Entry for ‘Thowsande’ |
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nOne of the earliest was the CatholiconnAnglicum, of 1483, and one of the problems can be seen from a glance at it – annentry taken at random shows the word ‘thousand’ is spelled ‘thowsande’. Inn1538, Sir Thomas Elyot produced his Workbook, another Latin-English dictionary,nbut the first monolingual English ‘dictionary’ was Richard Mulcaster’snElementarie of 1582, although this was merely a word-list without definitions.
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| Mulcaster’s Elementarie |
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nRobert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall (1604) added definitions to its 3000nlisted words, although they are not really all that helpful – a ‘specke’ is ‘anspot, or marke’, a ‘spectacle’ is ‘something to be looked at’, and so on. Therenfollowed other dictionaries, but the real break-through came with Dr SamuelnJohnson’s two-volume Dictionary of the English Language (1755).
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| Johnson’s Dictionary – Title Page |
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nJohnson lists 40,000 words with detailedndefinitions and cites 140,000 quotations, showing how other writers have usednthe words. It is a great work, and justly feted, not least as the personalitynof Johnson shines through his definitions; ‘Lexicographer’ is defined as ‘… anwriter of dictionaries, a harmless drudge’.
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| Entry for Lexicographer from Johnson’s Dictionary |
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nIt is a testament to Johnson’snscholarship that the next real advance in the publication of dictionaries didnnot come until 1857, when it was decided that a work was needed that includednlost and obsolete words, together with new and fashionable words, together withntheir pronunciation, word families, etymology, their first recorded usage, andnhow their meanings may have changed through time. The project was agreed on, innprinciple, and volunteers recruited to provide examples of quotations. After ancouple of false starts, James Murray was appointed as editor and workednceaselessly until his death. The first dictionary fascicle was published inn1884, and work continued until 1928, when the first edition of A New EnglishnDictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collectednby The Philological Society, better known (from 1895) as the Oxford EnglishnDictionary, was completed, in ten bound volumes.
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| 1933 Supplement to the OED – Title Page |
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nA supplement was issued inn1933 and the dictionary republished as thirteen volumes. More supplementsnfollowed, and in 1989 a second edition was published in 20 volumes. Workncontinues, and a third edition is planned for 2037! In 1933 the first editionnof the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was published, a two-volume distillationnof the larger work, and further editions followed in due course.
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nHere is anpicture of my two-volume edition from 1993. I won these in a crosswordncompetition in the Independent newspaper – they retailed then for about £90, (thencurrent cost is around £120), so I doubt if I’d ever have been able to affordnto buy them.
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