Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective [1 ed.] 9781443807210, 9781847181688

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Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective

Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective

Edited by

John Considine and Giovanni Iamartino

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective, edited by John Considine and Giovanni Iamartino This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by John Considine and Giovanni Iamartino and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-168-6; ISBN 13: 9781847181688

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Historical Lexicography and Lexicology John Considine....................................................................................................vii Chapter One Writing the History of English Lexicography: Is There a History of English Lexicography after Starnes and Noyes? Fredric Dolezal...................................................................................................... 1 Chapter Two To “Finde Wordes Newe”: Chaucer, Lexical Growth, and MED First Citations R. Carter Hailey .................................................................................................. 14 Chapter Three The Emergence of Lexicology in Renaissance English Dictionaries Gabriele Stein...................................................................................................... 25 Chapter Four The Real Richard Howlet R. W. McConchie ............................................................................................... 39 Chapter Five “Certaine Things to be Considered & Corrected in Will. Dugdales SaxonLexicon” Paola Tornaghi .................................................................................................... 50 Chapter Six Alphabet Fatigue and Compiling Consistency in Early English Dictionaries N. E. Osselton ..................................................................................................... 81 Chapter Seven Blancardus’ Lexicon Medicum in Harris’s Lexicon Technicum: A Lexicographic and Lexicological Study Elisabetta Lonati ................................................................................................. 91

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Chapter Eight Reporting Eighteenth-Century Vocabulary in the OED Charlotte Brewer ............................................................................................... 109 Chapter Nine Expediency and Experience: John S. Farmer and William E. Henley’s Slang and its Analogues Julie Coleman.................................................................................................... 136 Chapter Ten The Great Un- Crisis: An Unknown Episode in the History of the OED Peter Gilliver..................................................................................................... 166 Chapter Eleven Idioms in Journalese: A Synchronic and Diachronic Study of Food and Drink Idioms in 200 years of The Times Laura Pinnavaia ................................................................................................ 178 Bibliography of Works Cited ......................................................................... 192 Contributors .................................................................................................... 216 Index................................................................................................................. 219

INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL LEXICOGRAPHY AND LEXICOLOGY JOHN CONSIDINE

1. Historical lexicography and lexicology as a field of inquiry Hans Aarsleff identified a “recent sharp rise of interest” in the history of linguistics as he surveyed the field in the early 1980s (Aarsleff 1982, 3), and Vivien Law noted that a decade later, “the history of linguistics was ... growing faster than any other subdiscipline of linguistics,” and that Even in the late 1980s, over five hundred publications were appearing annually in the history of linguistics, more than twice as many as in syntax, semantics or phonetics, its nearest competitors. (Law 2003, xv)

This extraordinary development has not left the history of lexicography unaffected. A wide range of periodical and monographic publications, not least those of several contributors to this volume, have treated it in recent decades. Many of the most important articles on English lexicography from the AngloSaxon period to the end of the eighteenth century will be united in the fourvolume Early English lexicographers collection forthcoming from Ashgate under the general editorship of Ian Lancashire. More fundamentally, the three magnificent volumes of Hausmann, Reichmann, Wiegand, and Zgusta’s Wörterbücher / Dictionaries / Dictionnaires, together with primary resources such as the printed dictionaries facsimiled in R. C. Alston’s series English linguistics 1500–1800 and those made freely available online in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Gallica project, offer rich opportunities for future research. The history of lexicography is naturally an object of interest to many practicing lexicographers: probably more so than, for instance, the history of phonetics to practicing phoneticists. One reason for this is that dictionary projects are often so long-lived that a current worker on a project is in a real sense the colleague of historical figures: the OED lexicographers whose revision of entries in the range philanthropal–pimento was published on 16 March 2006 were working on material just a century old, for the original fascicle Ph–piper

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had been published in June 1906 (McMorris 2000, 230). Even when a project is itself newly begun, it is almost certain to be shaped to some extent by the consultation of earlier dictionaries. Another reason is that diachronically oriented dictionary projects are themselves works of historical research: no wonder that the history of lexicography should be so well written when so many lexicographers are themselves historians. The histories they write are those of lexical items: in other words, they are engaged in one kind of historical lexicology. Lexicology was defined, in what appears to have been its first use in English, as “a treatise of a word in particular, or separately” (Connelly and Higgins 1797–8, s.v. legicológia). If lexicology is to be defined in this spirit, as the study of individual words, then it follows that the boundary between lexicography and lexicology is real but permeable. A dictionary which merely lists words and equivalents is lexicographical but scarcely lexicological, and a discursive study of a single word is lexicological but scarcely lexicographical. Even these cases, however, are arguable: the choice of a wordlist is a matter of lexicological judgement (for instance, the maker of a seventeenth-century hard-word dictionary must have tried to assess which current words were likeliest to puzzle inexpert readers), and a single-word study published as a monograph or a journal article may respond to, and inform, treatments of that word in dictionaries. The boundary between the compilation of historical dictionaries and the study of historical dictionaries is likewise, as we have just seen, permeable: revising an OED entry is a matter both of doing lexicography and of thinking about the lexicography of the past. Therefore, the history of lexicography can usefully be united with historical lexicology and the practice of historical lexicography under the combined rubric of “historical lexicography and lexicology.” This is the raison d’être of this book. The articles collected here are all based on papers given at the second International Conference for Historical Lexicography and Lexicology (ICHLL), which took place in 2004 at the Palazzo Feltrinelli in Gargnano del Garda under the auspices of the Università degli Studi di Milano. Articles based on some of the papers given at the first ICHLL, which took place two years earlier at the University of Leicester, were collected and published as the volume Historical dictionaries and historical dictionary research (Coleman and McDermott 2004). Like its predecessor, this is by no means a proceedings volume. The articles in it have been rewritten from the forms in which they were presented, and they also reflect a careful selection of the original papers, focussing exclusively on English-language lexicography and lexicology.

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2. Overview of this volume The first paper in this collection, Fredric Dolezal’s “Writing the history of English lexicography,” opens up some of the most important questions addressed in the collection as a whole. How, Dolezal asks, do we write the history of English lexicography? DeWitt Starnes and Gertrude Noyes’s The English dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson has been unsuperseded for sixty years, a tribute to its accuracy and clarity. But the long reign of a standard authority may have a deadening effect on a field of inquiry: when Gabriele Stein wrote a short introduction to a facsmile reprint published in 1991, she noted that Research on the dictionaries studied by Professor Starnes and Professor Noyes has generally focussed on identifying further sources and interdependencies between individual works revealing the lexicographical methods used by the compilers. (Stein 1991, xi).

This sort of Quellenforschung is extremely useful as far as it goes, but it is inevitably limited in its intellectual ambitions and in its appeal to non-specialist readers. The chronological range of Starnes and Noyes’s book is also limited, and although the period up to 1604 has been surveyed by Stein in The English dictionary before Cawdrey (1985), for Anglophone lexicography after 1755 the only monographic overview appears to be Jonathon Green’s popular Chasing the sun (1996). Dolezal sketched some of the possibilities for a history of English lexicography after Starnes and Noyes in his review of the reprint edition (Dolezal 1996), and now opens up these possibilities much further. So, for instance, he reflects upon and challenges the application of concepts such as “influence” and “borrowing” to the history of lexicography (and indeed “plagiarism,” with which cf. Landau 2001, 402–4); questions the relationship of the history of dictionaries to literary history; and discusses the relationship between typology and chronology as ordering principles. Dolezal’s critical questioning encourages further questions inspired by his. Is “the English dictionary” itself a useful rubric: what might a History of the dictionary in Britain look like? Could a single author write it? Sooner or later, the time will come for The English dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson to be superseded, and whoever undertakes the work will have to take careful heed of Dolezal’s arguments. Carter Hailey’s paper discusses the picture of Chaucer’s lexical inventiveness which is offered by the Middle English Dictionary. One of its arguments is simply that the completion of MED makes it possible for the first time to measure Chaucer’s rate of innovation, and that this can be shown to be high, manifesting itself not only in the introduction of new forms into the vocabulary of English, but also in the sense-development of pre-existing forms.

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This leads to a wider consideration of the role of the first citation. First citations are of course notoriously antedatable: OED’s first citation for moonbeam is from the 1600 quarto of A midsummer night’s dream, but it would be rash to assume that nobody had written the word down before Shakespeare. Less obviously, in most fields, a given lexical item may well be coined or borrowed independently by a number of writers. So, for instance, there is no need to see Connelly and Higgins as the only begetters of the English word lexicology, and similarly, a word like unsuperseded may be coined independently by a series of users. A word attested in a solitary obscure source and then in Chaucer and thereafter in numerous sources—Hailey gives the example complexioun—may really have been brought into English usage by Chaucer. Lexical innovation is not, then, an activity which can be measured simply by examining the records offered even by a capacious historical dictionary: the lexicologist has to end up making kinds of judgements which the lexicographer cannot realistically make. Gabriele Stein’s paper on the emergence of lexicology in early modern English dictionaries offers a wide overview of the sort of lexicological information which early lexicographers could report. Here as elsewhere in her work, notably her study of Palsgrave (Stein 1997), she points out the lexicological richness and sophistication of the work of early English bilingual and monolingual lexicographers, showing their understanding of the nature of lexicographical comprehensiveness and the openness of the lexical system; of questions such as register and currency; of synonymy and polysemy; and of other aspects of the structure of the word stock of English. One striking feature of this story is the qualitative and quantitative transition from the rather limited glossaries of the earlier Middle Ages to the dictionaries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Perhaps, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English dictionaries being rather scarce, only a union history of European lexicography could help us understand how that took place. What is clear from Stein’s paper is that, extraordinary as was Palsgrave’s achievement, it must be contextualized in the lexicological thought of a number of his English contemporaries. Many of these are insufficiently studied figures. Rod McConchie’s paper on Richard Howlet (formerly known by the semilatinized name Huloet) investigates the frustratingly obscure author of a familiar and important dictionary. McConchie shows, for instance, on what grounds we can associate Howlet with the Elizabethan printer John Day, and thereby suggests a whole social context for him, or indeed several: Day was not only a committed evangelical but also “one of the titans of the Elizabethan book world” (Pettegree 2004). Did Howlet dedicate his Abcedarium to the evangelical Thomas Goodrich, Bishop of Ely, simply because he was born near Ely, or because Goodrich was Lord Chancellor, or because they shared sympathies? Who actually printed the Abcedarium? It has a title-page device associated with

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Day, but the imprint is that of rather an obscure bookseller, William Riddel, and the printing has been ascribed to a third party. Why does the book itself not tell a clearer story? Questions like these lead us towards a richer understanding of what we might call the sociology of the dictionary, both as text and as physical book. One project which will have a hugely stimulating effect on this sort of work is the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, whose appearance in 2004 made it possible to see at a glance how far the biographical scholarship on any of its subjects had progressed: in the present paper, as in his Oxford DNB article on Howlet, McConchie shows the way to further work in the field by the questions which he leaves open as well as the ones to which he provides full or partial answers. In the case of Howlet, the printed dictionary tells us less than we would like to know about its maker, and the manuscript evidence which might have supplemented it appears to be wanting. Paola Tornaghi’s paper deals with a chapter in the history of English-language lexicography for which the great majority of the evidence consists of manuscript lexica, namely the making of dictionaries of Old English before the publication of William Somner’s Dictionarium saxonico-latino-anglicum in 1659. The list of these lexica is, in its broad outline, well-established: the Vocabularium of Laurence Nowell (a1567), edited by Albert Marckwardt in 1952, was succeeded by the still unpublished dictionaries of John Joscelyn (c1565–75), Sir William Dugdale (1644), and Sir Simonds D’Ewes (a1650), and by the lost dictionary of Jan de Laet and some minor vocabularies, before at last Somner’s dictionary appeared in 1659. The relationships between one dictionary and another, however, are complex, and Tornaghi’s important contribution to knowledge in this paper is to present and analyze the cogent manuscript evidence which shows William Somner at work around 1650 with the manuscripts both of Dugdale’s dictionary and of D’Ewes’s, correcting the one from the other and preparing himself for his own great achievement. Examining this process helps us to re-evaluate Dugdale’s place in the history of Old English lexicography; and it reminds us of Dolezal’s point about the collective quality of dictionary-making. As the Oxford DNB entry for Dugdale points out of his work in general, It is true that Dugdale benefited to some extent from other men’s labours without giving them sufficient acknowledgement. This was a complaint lodged against him in the eighteenth century, but it is beside the point, and characteristic of an age more jealous of individual achievement in scholarship. In the seventeenth century antiquarian research was a co-operative activity, and scholars were desirous of having their protracted schemes brought to fulfilment by another if age or death curtailed their designs. (Parry 2004).

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Noel Osselton’s paper takes up the theme of the curtailment of designs by identifying and demonstrating a phenomenon which will henceforth surely always be called by the name which he gives it here: that of alphabet fatigue. Early dictionaries, he points out, tended to give entries in the first half of the alphabet more generous treatment than entries in the second half. The increasing weariness of the lexicographer working from A towards Z is, to be sure, a familiar story. As Einar Haugen has put it, echoing Allen Walker Read’s remark that “the pathway of English lexicography is strewn with unfinished dictionaries,” The history of lexicography is littered with abandoned wrecks and dry bones, and few major ventures have been completed by the person who started them. A Danish wit has written a quatrain which we may freely translate: “At the dictionary’s letter A / Mr. Brandt is young and gay— / When he finally arrives at Zed, / he’s in his wheelchair, nearly dead.” (Haugen 1984, 3; cf. Read 1937).1

But Osselton takes us far beyond the truism that dictionaries wear their makers out. He makes an elegant quantitative demonstration of the effect to which alphabet fatigue affected some of the completed English dictionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, using the physical midpoint of a dictionary as an index: the earlier the point in alphabetical sequence which has been reached by the physical midpoint, the more pronounced the alphabet fatigue. He then investigates its causal factors—which include but are by no means limited to the editor’s physical exhaustion. Financial pressure is one (the example of the Trésor de la langue française springs to mind); less obviously, the refinement of editorial principle is another. Elisabetta Lonati’s paper on the use made in the first volume of John Harris’s Lexicon technicum (1702) of the Dutch physician Stephanus Blancardus’ Lexicon medicum (1679, English trs. 1684 onwards) brings several new themes into the collection. One of these is that of the importance to the history of lexicography of the middle ground between the lexicographical and the encyclopedic. Was the Lexicon technicum strictly a dictionary? Starnes and Noyes do not devote a chapter to it, but discuss it on account of its influence on John Kersey’s additions to Edward Phillips’s New world of words and on the Glossographia anglicana nova (Starnes and Noyes 1946, 85–6, 92–3). They note also that the generous use of cuts which adds to the pleasure of handling the Lexicon technicum may have inspired Nathan Bailey’s use of cuts in his dictionary of 1727 (ibid. 110). As Lonati demonstrates, Harris’s work calls both 1

Haugen translates an anonymous verse quoted Gullberg 1964, ix: “Ved leksikonnets A hr. Brandt | er ung og slank og elegant — | ved leksikonnets Ø han kør | i rullestol med hørerør.” Ø is the last letter of the Danish alphabet.

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for lexicographical and lexicological study. It calls, too, for social study, as a work of popularization: a significant early milestone, indeed, in the development of the alphabetical encyclopedias which play such an important part in the history of reading and publishing in the eighteenth century. As Lonati suggests, Harris’s work is part of a process by which the technical material presented in Latin by Blancardus was made available to a widening Englishreading audience in the decades after the publication of the Lexicon medicum. It belongs, then, to the same development in the social history of knowledge as Harris’s free public lectures on mathematics at the Marine Coffee House in London. And thirdly, it is a reminder of the international context of English lexicography, so relevant also to Stein’s topic. Harris was aware of a major French antecedent of his work, Thomas Corneille’s Grand dictionnaire des arts et des sciences, and used continental European sources other than Blancardus (Harris 1704, sigs. a2r–v); his work was in turn acknowledged as a model by Diderot and D’Alembert (Shackleton 1970, 390). Charlotte Brewer addresses a long-standing puzzle posed by the documentation in the Oxford English Dictionary: why are eighteenth-century authors not better represented in OED’s illustrative quotations? The user of the dictionary regularly comes upon entries such as make-peace, which can be a noun (quotations from 1516 to 1657, then 1855) or an adjective (quotations from 1601 and 1836), but is not documented from the eighteenth century as either part of speech. One possible explanation is that the eighteenth century was a period during which writers confined themselves to a self-consciously restricted and classical vocabulary: did words like make-peace seem too rustic to be used? Brewer argues meticulously for the other logical possibility, discussing the construction and use of OED’s body of quotations, and showing by use of the databases Literature online and Eighteenth-century collections online how markedly the dictionary does under-represent the lexical scope of eighteenth-century writers—including its favourites such as Alexander Pope, as well as writers further outside the nineteenth-century canon such as William Blake and A. L. Barbauld. Interestingly, since the first version of this paper was read at Gargnano, the proportion of eighteenth-century quotations in the revised part of OED has increased. (Make-peace, by the way, does not seem to have been a common word in the eighteenth century, and I have found it elusive.) Like Brewer, Julie Coleman examines some of the working practices and decisions of lexicographers at the end of the nineteenth century, as she writes on Farmer and Henley’s Slang and its analogues. This eight-volume dictionary (seven original volumes and then a revised vol. 1) and its makers have not always had the attention due to them: Farmer does not at present even have an entry in the Oxford DNB, though he deserves one for his lexicography and his publishing projects. Coleman’s account of their lexicographical work analyzes a

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sample of entries from each volume of their dictionary, showing how its inclusion criteria and features such as the citation of sources and the provision of usage labels change, and asking why the changes happened: was it, for instance, under Henley’s influence that the Bible ceased to be cited after the original volume 1? Coleman points out that while volumes 2–7 make little or no use of the Bible, it reappears as a source after Henley’s death, in the new entries in the revised volume 1. This revised volume is, more generally, a guide to the ways in which the principles of the dictionary developed over the years: as Coleman says, it makes it possible to differentiate the effects of fatigue from those of experience. Peter Gilliver’s paper likewise discusses the changing strategies of lexicographers moving through the alphabet. The case he examines is a special one, that of the problem posed by the vast number of English words which begin with the prefix un-. The productivity of derivational affixes was a problem which Murray and his colleagues had considered in the past, as for instance in a letter of Murray’s to the phonetician A. J. Ellis in 1876, which reflected that “the subject is endless & exhaustless, boundless & bottomless but the raising of it is not purposeless I assure you” (qtd. K. Murray 1977, 192). But un-, which brought so many derived forms together in a single alphabetical sequence, caused particular concern to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press, and to the editor responsible for U, William Craigie: the Delegates feared that Craigie was handling the material at impossible length, and Craigie that he was being required to condense it unduly, a kind of conflict which occurred sporadically in the publishing history of the OED. This particular conflict was alluded to briefly in the British Academy obituary of Craigie (Wyllie 1961, 280), but has since remained unexplored; Gilliver now uses material from the OUP archives to show its development and also the solutions, in terms of inclusion criteria and typographic design, which resolved it. His paper ends with the intriguing comment that the controversy “does seem to have been a key factor in [Craigie’s] becoming disillusioned with (and eventually semi-detached from)” the OED project. The great lexicographer’s subsequent dealings with the University of Chicago Press also ended with Craigie as a semi-detached dictionary editor, reading proofs for the Dictionary of American English at his residence in Oxfordshire, and writing angry letters when his instructions were not followed; one of his correspondents at the press urged him in response to one of these to pay another visit to Chicago, to have “a thorough discussion of the whole question of Dictionary procedure” and “above all else to satisfy yourself that we have not sprouted horns!” (Donald Bean to Craigie, February 18, 1938, in Chicago, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago Press Records, 1892–1965. Box 129, folder 5). A biography of Craigie would be most welcome.

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Finally, Laura Pinnavaia’s “Idioms in journalese” offers yet another perspective on the interplay of lexicography and lexicology. Idioms have long been a major concern for lexicographers (see e.g. Stein 1997, ad indicem svv. idioms and adages), and their treatment in dictionaries continues to evolve: compare the treatment of idioms in the OED2 entry for pin, where they are interspersed in the entry so that pull the pin “uncouple” is at sense 1o, and not worth a pin “worthless” is at 3b, and in the OED3 entry, where they have their own section, so that pull the pin is at P1c(c) and not worth a pin is at P2a(a). But as Pinnavaia points out, the flexibility of idioms—the fact that “don’t care two pins” or “not care a pin” or “don’t give two pins” are all idiomatic variants of not worth a pin (they are the forms in OED3’s last three illustrative quotations for the idiom)—makes their syntactic behaviour an object of study too. She discusses a set of idioms, those bearing on food and drink which occur in a corpus of articles selected from The Times, from a syntactic and semantic point of view, analyzing their variations and arguing for the systematic relationship of their syntactic modifications and the information which they convey.

3. Conclusions Between them, these papers sum up some of the most interesting and valuable features of historical lexicography and lexicology as the field is studied today. Four of these are particularly striking. The first is a high level of attention to the dictionary-making process as extended in historical time. Thinking of a dictionary as a simple unified object is of course unwise. The last volumes of a major historical dictionary issued over several decades may differ quite markedly from the first. This has been documented, for instance, in the cases of the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal, and the Dictionary of the older Scottish tongue (Brenninger 1951; Osselton 2000, 71–2; Dareau 2002). Gilliver’s paper in this collection shows how the editors of a late volume in a long-running dictionary may innovate successfully under pressure. Osselton’s reminds us of the changes which are likely to take place even within a single-volume dictionary, and Coleman’s is a meticulous documentation of the volume-byvolume changes in a dictionary issued over fifteen years. Another feature which is evident in this collection is a recourse to manuscript materials. Starnes and Noyes addressed only printed dictionaries in The English dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, and they were quite right to do so; these were the dictionaries to which the greatest numbers of contemporary readers had access. But of course, some printed dictionaries had small circulations—and some dictionaries remained in manuscript because of idosyncrasies or ambitions which now make them very interesting to us. The

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editing of medieval English glossaries and dictionaries has produced valuable results, but much is yet to be done (cf. Stein 1985, 1–120). Even well-known manuscripts in major institutional collections repay re-examination (see e.g. Takeda 2004). Relatively few early modern English dictionaries have been edited from manuscript, though as Ian Lancashire points out (2004a), many of those which remain in manuscript are obviously of great interest; some of them are now being edited as part of the online database Lexicons of early modern English (Lancashire 2006–). Also of interest are copies of early modern dictionaries with lexicographical annotations and interleavings, such as Sir Roger Twysden’s fascinating interleaved copy of Cowell’s Interpreter, now in the British Library (Add. MSS 24281–24283). There seems to be no overview of English dictionary manuscripts (including, of course, interleaved and annotated copies of printed dictionaries) from the eighteenth century and thereafter. Work like McConchie’s and Tornaghi’s in this collection therefore investigates territory which is substantially unmapped. Although the Murray Papers in the Bodleian Library have been mined by a number of researchers (see the five-page list of those used by Lynda Mugglestone in Mugglestone 2005, 252–7) and Gilliver and others have made effective use of the OED archives at Oxford University Press, much material of this sort must lie unused—some of it, as Dolezal suggests in his paper in this collection, in the keeping of publishers who may not be anxious for it to circulate widely. Another feature of this collection is an increasing demand for statistical accuracy, associated with an increasing use of online material. Since the release of the Oxford English Dictionary in machine-readable form, it has been possible to ask a new set of questions about its resources—questions which, it should be added, were foreshadowed more than a quarter of a century ago in the remarkable work of Jürgen Schäfer. This is what John Willinsky began to do in his deeply flawed Empire of words: the reign of the OED (1994; for a scathing and authoritative review cf. Stanley 1997), and Charlotte Brewer’s work in this collection and elsewhere uses machine searches together with reading of the physical dictionary to see patterns in its representation of English vocabulary. The release of Johnson’s Dictionary on CD-ROM has likewise opened up the possibility of fast, exact searching of its text, and the Johnson Dictionary Project in progress at the University of Birmingham promises more. Other major dictionaries are likewise becoming available for searching on CD-ROM or the Internet, for instance the Deutsches Wörterbuch (see Christmann and Schares 2003). At the other end of the spectrum from lexicography to lexicology, Laura Pinnavaia’s contribution to this collection likewise discusses practical and theoretical points in the study of English idiom flexibility with a range made possible by the availability of online textbases. Projects such as Lexicons of early modern English, which at present offers 156 lexicons and half a million

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word entries to searchers, will clearly extend the possibilities of research in the field much further. Even where dictionaries are not available in machinereadable form, though, work like Coleman’s in this volume shows what can be achieved by way of statistical analysis. A last feature of several of the essays in this collection which I want to point out is their clear awareness of the biographical. Lexicographical biography in English has for some decades had K. M. E. Murray’s Caught in the web of words (1977) as a shining example of what can be done in this respect by a firstrate writer in full sympathy with her subject and with access to a rich archive. It is now hard to believe that when this book was submitted to Oxford University Press, it was refused as too provocative (Foster 2004), just as it is hard to believe that an academic press should have rejected James Watson’s memoir The double helix a few years earlier (Aarsleff 1967/1983, viii). The two rejections doubtless came from the same sense that a strongly biographical, let alone autobiographical, approach to the history of scholarship was somehow unsound. It has its dangers, certainly: Simon Winchester’s The surgeon of Crowthorne (published in North America as The professor and the madman) deserves its wide market, and has much to offer scholars, but it is, sometimes frustratingly, not a scholarly book. But the care with which McConchie establishes the parameters of the elusive Richard Howlet’s life, or with which Tornaghi and Gilliver examine the relationships of individuals as they can be traced in the archival records of lexicography in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries respectively, are models of a humane and scholarly awareness that dictionaries are made and shaped by people, and that if we are to learn about the dictionaries, we must do our best to understand the people.

CHAPTER ONE WRITING THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY: IS THERE A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY AFTER STARNES AND NOYES? FREDRIC DOLEZAL

1. Early Monolingual English Dictionaries: Types and Sources In the writing of the history of English lexicography, the monolingual dictionary, sometimes called the “general-purpose” English dictionary, is generally and implicitly considered the central object of study. The dictionaries are divided into a set of types which includes glossaries; vocabularies; spellers; monolingual dictionaries; bilingual dictionaries; and multilingual dictionaries. By now articles on the history of English lexicography also describe the history of specialized English dictionaries, including those compiled according to linguistic ideas (for example, historical dictionaries and phraseological dictionaries); taxonomic categories (“topically arranged” dictionaries); language community (national, regional, dialect, and slang dictionaries); and specialized users (for example, learners’ dictionaries). When we consider the range of writing on the history of lexicography in general and of English lexicography in particular, we can extract a good if incomplete outline of dictionary typology. Even so, it is mostly the history of the “general purpose monolingual English dictionary” that influences the way we understand and receive the history of English lexicography. The English dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson 1604–1755 by DeWitt T. Starnes and Gertrude E. Noyes (hereafter cited as The English dictionary) is the most comprehensive book on the history of English monolingual dictionaries, despite its covering a limited time period (1604–1755) and a limited bibliography (due to the scope of its authors’ research agenda). As Gabriele

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Chapter One

Stein notes, “Their historical account of early monolingual English lexicography still stands to the present day” (Stein 1991, ix). Stein also notes that in the intervening years since the publication of The English dictionary we have expanded the idea of English lexicography to include bilingual and multilingual dictionaries, to which we could add dictionaries ordered by concept rather than alphabetically, glossaries and other lists of words, and the study of the dictionary as text. Undoubtedly, Starnes and Noyes continue to have an important and continuing influence on general works on English lexicography: Sidney Landau writes in an endnote to the second chapter, “A brief history of English lexicography,” of his successful Dictionaries: The art and craft of lexicography that The English dictionary is “the chief source of information for early, monolingual English lexicography” (2001, 428). The same influence can be found in Jonathon Green’s Chasing the sun: Dictionary makers and the dictionaries they made (1996). Both authors also rely on articles and books published subsequent to the work of Starnes and Noyes. A different perspective on The English dictionary can be found in the work of Jürgen Schäfer (1970; 1980; 1984; 1989). Schäfer had been working on describing the growth and development of English lexicography in the Early Modern English period at the time of his death. The work he did accomplish and publish called for a reappraisal of some of the basic findings in Starnes and Noyes. Along the way of this research he presented evidence that the Oxford English Dictionary fell short in its documentation of the vocabulary of the period, because its policy of treating evidence from dictionaries compiled in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with some circumspection led to an inconsistent treatment of lexical items registered in those dictionaries. So, for instance, he noted that Some words are cited exclusively [in the OED] from hard word dictionaries without reference to earlier sources or to the successive dictionary transmission. Other words are last assigned to the Middle English period without reference to their sudden reappearance in the hard word dictionaries. (Schäfer 1989, 2:16)

His study of early modern lexicography contradicts some widely held notions about the sources of the dictionaries (for supporting and similar evidence see Stein 1986 and Osselton 1990, 1950; for further insight and elaboration on “hard words” see Zgusta 2006, 166ff., “‘Hard words’—‘schwierige Wörter’ in der älteren englischen einsprachigen Lexikographie”). The research underlying the present compilation was originally prompted by the discovery that the Jacobean compilers of hard words, Robert Cawdrey (Table Alphabetical, 1604), John Bullokar (English Expositor, 1616) and Henry Cockeram (English Dictionarie, 1623), had gathered many of these difficult

Writing the History of English Lexicography

3

words from earlier monolingual glossaries and had not merely Anglicized Latin or Graeco-Latin lemmas taken from bilingual dictionaries of their time, the widely accepted thesis advanced by DeWitt T. Starnes and Gertrude E. Noyes. (Schäfer 1989, 2:2)

Allen Walker Read, precedaneous to Schäfer, made a similar argument in a posthumously published article written in 1935, “The beginnings of English lexicography” (Read 1935/2003). Needless to say, Read’s original essay was not influenced by The English dictionary, and was not available to its authors; we can only speculate as to how his findings might have influenced them. Read makes this claim: The purely English dictionary, in the Coote–Cawdrey–Bullokar–Cockeram tradition, arose as a “schoolmaster’s help” (with or without an actual schoolmaster), and I regard this as the main stream of development. The other streams of influence that converged to produce the English dictionary are as follows: (2) The model of the dictionaries of the classical languages; (3) Glosses and interlingual dictionaries; (4) The impulse from the scientific study of language; (5) The antiquarian and etymological dictionaries; (6) The specialists’ dictionaries. (1935/2003, 187–188)

In summation he says that “the first faint indication of English lexicography is to be found in the effort during the Reformation to make the scriptures intelligible to common people” and that the “most important names in the ensuing years are John Bullokar, Henry Cockeram, Thomas Blount, Edward Phillips, William Lloyd, Samuel Clarke, Elisha Coles, and John Kersey” (Read 1935/2003, 223–224).1 These discoveries tell us how much more bibliographic and textual research needs to be undertaken as part of writing the history of English lexicography.2 As Schäfer points out—and it is even more relevant today—the availability of microfilm and computer technology allows us to be more comprehensive and discrete in our analyses of the documents covered by The Short Title Catalogue 1

Read’s inclusion of Lloyd (see Lloyd 1668 and Wilkins 1668) raises the questions of “dictionariness” and “influence” in the history of English lexicography (cf. Dolezal 1985 and 1986 and Knappe 2004). The English dictionary compiled by Samuel Clarke in 1670 was sold by his bookseller as the twelfth edition of Cockeram’s English dictionarie (Read 1935/2003, 221). Clarke is not identified by Starnes and Noyes, who cite him as “S.C,” calling him the “reviser” of Cockeram’s Dictionarie (1946, 34). 2 For example, Sidney Landau has recently written that “The first English dictionary occurred almost inevitably as a modification of bilingual dictionaries, some of them of far greater importance” (2001, 47).

4

Chapter One

than was possible in 1946 (and 1989). His research helps broaden our understanding of the “hard-word” tradition. Here is what Schäfer writes: The evidence assembled on the following pages gains significance in further refuting the Anglicization thesis since it strongly suggests that the compilers did indeed take much of their material either directly from contemporary texts or from explanatory glossaries attached to a variety of English publications. This means that their materials should be considered authentic, that is, actually used in Elizabethan texts and that the origins of monolingual lexicography have to be reexamined. (1989, 2:2)

What was the use of an early modern dictionary? Was it a collection of lexical oddities introduced in an ink-hornish manner, or could the “hard words” be found in the printed texts of the day, so that the dictionary was really a reference aid to contemporary readers? The people who consulted and bought dictionaries presumably did not read them sequentially, though this is not to deny that some dictionaries, and related reference texts, have a limited readership, or that some because of their systematic lexical structure even lend support for a readerly construction of narrative.3 There is even some evidence that the authors of some early dictionaries intended the text to be read in a fairly consecutive manner.4 The commercial venture of English lexicography and the cultural and individual reception of dictionaries (and the like) require their own respective studies.

3

I have addressed the issue of narrative by analyzing prayer in a religious text and in a scientific text by Bishop Wilkins (Dolezal, 1994). Topical dictionaries, and the like, belong in this category, and have a place in the definition and historiography of dictionary (for a detailed account in the early English tradition see Hüllen 1999). From a related perspective, David Cram (1994a; 1994b) considers the influence of seventeenthcentury universal language schemes and “concordances of words” and of “things” in the early history of English lexicography. 4 Considine (1998) has presented evidence on owners and users of large historical dictionaries (Johnson 1755 and the fascicles of the OED) as readers for pleasure; and in a study of some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dictionaries and phrasebooks he claims that “Early modern dictionaries were texts which were read …,” citing Mainwaring 1644 as an example of a dictionary “to be read from end to end” (2001, 196; 205). At this time, we do not know how many readers there were (or are) in relation to the number of nonpleasure-reading users, or even among the readers how frequently they consulted or used, rather than read, their dictionaries.

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2. Establishing a History of English Lexicography A variety of books and essays since The English dictionary have modified and extended our understanding of “influence” in the genealogy of English dictionaries. Writing a history of English lexicography leads us to consider the usefulness of “influence” as a term of art, and to develop a historical perspective more comprehensive than constructing a great chain of vocabulary items organized around a principle of entries borrowed or plagiarized from earlier dictionary sources. A comprehensive study of dictionary texts would require the production of scholarly editions of each text, and this would include, for example, identifying and emending printing errors, and documenting changes to the lexicon across editions. The abstraction, “the dictionary,” is not the printed resolution of a textual chain of events. It is by now widely reported in the literature that the idea of “the dictionary” had taken hold of the literary imagination of readers and authors in the earliest period of English lexicography. Therefore, I have considered the history of English lexicography as a special case of bibliography and textual study (see Dolezal 1986 and 1989); so that, to name one consequence, the ideas of “borrowing” and “plagiarizing” have limited usefulness in understanding not only textual history, but also notions of ownership, property and language. In a broader sense, a history of lexicography provides insight into questions regarding the means of transmitting of information through application of linguistic and lexicographic principles. The notable achievement of Starnes and Noyes has made their book the standard text on the history of English lexicography. Gabriele Stein (1986) has illuminated the history of English lexicography before 1604, but there is no unified or standard history of English lexicography from 1755 to 1900 to provide a balance of perspective to the standard text, nor has there been a unified revision of the history from Cawdrey to Johnson. One result has been the general acceptance among non-specialists of an historical division of dictionaries into Before Johnson (“curiosities of a neologizing age”), Johnson’s Dictionary (“the standard for all English dictionaries”), and Modern Dictionaries (“authorities of current pronunciations and definitions”). More than fifty years has passed since the original publication date of The English dictionary; in those years the published work on dictionaries both in the academic and commercial domains has steadily expanded. Unfortunately, the new information and findings go mostly unnoted by the general scholarly audience, perhaps because the articles and books on the history of lexicography usually follow their own internal logic and principles, and therefore, taken together, do not provide a unified historical or thematic perspective.

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2.1. English Lexicography in Literary History A history of English lexicography would not be complete that did not take full notice of dictionaries and the mutual literary, philosophical, and cultural dependencies that are revealed when we look at the print artifacts that provide the sources and legitimation of orthography, history, definition, and so forth that are recorded in the linguistic commodity called the English dictionary. The commodity over time has become a cultural and intellectual standard by which all texts, including the source texts for the dictionaries, are themselves interpreted through the instantiation of meanings and forms found in a dictionary. One alternate major trend in writing the history of English lexicography can be found in literary critical studies. Since Johnson’s Dictionary stands at the pinnacle of esteem in the literary convention of our time, it is not surprising that he and his dictionary have been the object of the most studies. One well-known example of the trend, W. K. Wimsatt’s Philosophic words, relying partly on the chronology and narrative of events found in Starnes and Noyes and some word and author counts of Freed (1939), takes English lexicography in the form of Johnson’s Dictionary into literary and cultural history and intellectual biography. In this kind of history the emphasis is on the dictionary as word-hoard and cultural repository. This study and succeeding studies like it do not necessarily show awareness of methods of linguistic and text analysis that would seem essential for adequately describing dictionary text types. As Rüdiger Schreyer points out in his essay on quotations (or illustrations) in Johnson, the categories that have been used to describe the Johnson corpus “tend to be based on criteria often vague and not mutually exclusive” (2000, 75); he shows in particular that because twentieth-century categories can not be used to legitimately describe seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury ideas, and because we have no single accepted taxonomy of texts, “Wimsatt’s division of authors into classes is simply ad hoc” (78). However, another point is worth making since it touches upon our understanding of any dictionary. Dictionaries are a marketplace commodity. The successful return on investment in making a dictionary requires the maker and the publisher to coordinate, even subordinate, their plans and ideals to their best judgment of what will sell. Johnson knew he was not expected to collect and describe the English language of his day … He was aware that his Dictionary would be regarded as a rival of the French dictionary … And he knew that like its rivals his dictionary was expected to correct, ascertain and fix the language … It was to be for English what the Italian dictionary and French dictionary were for Italian and French. This was his unique selling proposition. (Schreyer 2000, 69)

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Suffice it to say, the literary-critical-based model of dictionary history shows some crucial unexamined premises about dictionary making, linguistic description, and the determination of text types. A dictionary presumes some level of linguistic awareness in the maker; the lexicographer must underwrite the dictionary with an informed language theory that can identify and describe the linguistic vagaries of the language or languages concerned. Certainly those who study dictionaries, rather than consult them for practical purposes, need to have an awareness of sound methods of linguistic and lexicographic analysis. And though we can not re-imagine ourselves as eighteenth-century dictionary users, our studies can not ignore that alphabetical dictionaries are made to be consulted. For the most part, the grammatical information, etymologies, and illustrative quotations and their beauties are contingent upon looking up a word. Undoubtedly, there are “readers” of dictionaries, especially dictionaries replete with illustrative quotations or phrases; even so, those readerly illustrative quotations were most likely culled not by pleasure readings, but by readings for lexical evidence collection. We can then see how an uncritical acceptance of a distinct period, from Cawdrey to Johnson, and a scope defined by the text types included in and excluded from The English dictionary by Starnes and Noyes can lead to an almost unassailable construct of received wisdom about Johnson’s Dictionary; of course, Johnsonian studies, like most studies of “great men” and “great works,” are rather fraught with an academic proprietary interest that gives the works and authors an almost decontextualized and autonomous existence. The scope of this present essay does not allow for a treatment of the literary scholarship on Johnson and the Dictionary; however, in general, the literarybased studies do not show a broad awareness of dictionary research based in the practical, historical, or theoretical lexicographical (and linguistic) disciplines. One result has been the tendency to promote the ideas of “innovation” and “influence” without sufficient historical and textual evidence.5

2.2. Typology and the Meaning of History If we are to attach the labels of innovative format, design, or content to any English dictionary, we must have a unified agreement on which text types count as dictionaries and which of the dictionaries so counted are to be included in a complete chronology of the English dictionary. Additionally, we must take into 5

One particular piece of conventional non-lexicographically informed wisdom has Johnson as the inventor of the illustrative quotation; another has Johnson’s dictionary as the main inspiration for the lexicographic format of the OED—for a detailed discussion of illustrative quotations in historical dictionaries see especially Zgusta (2006) Chapter One, “History and Dictionaries.”

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account that dictionaries are typologically mixed and sometimes answer to particular cultural, philosophical, or technical demands. The idea “historical dictionary” can serve as a good example of the difficulty of fixing a dictionary to a single typology. Thus, the expression “historical dictionary” is used in reference both to period dictionaries, and to diachronic dictionaries, either of them situated on various points or stretches of the flow of time, or development. That many, perhaps even most dictionaries simultaneously consist of components that belong to different types may go without saying. (Zgusta 2006, 3)

There are some other questions we should ask: for example, what do we mean by “history” in the rubric History of English lexicography? “History” in practice has meant documenting a chronology of dictionaries (in general, “a chain of events”) or providing a narrative that explains the succession of dictionaries (sometimes called “historiography”). The consequence of the former would be to establish a causal history: in other words, to determine what texts (the “events”) are relevant (as primary sources) along the chain of events. The consequence of the latter would be to argue that there are commonly held principles of analysis and explanation; this would show how the chain of events and dictionaries along that chain become a narrative. The following statement, excerpted from a study by Zgusta of the history of historical dictionaries in the western tradition, helps bring focus to the question of writing histories for any dictionary (text) type (cf. Reichmann 1984). As for history as the chain of events itself, there are two types of connection between dictionaries and the chain of events called history (of language): either the dictionary in question (or rather, its author) tries to exercise an influence on that chain of events, that is, tries to determine or change the development; or the dictionary does not attempt that, but by being descriptive it is a source of our knowledge of that chain of events, a source of data that can be used in giving the narrative of these events. (Zgusta 2006, 2)

The strictly chronological narrative has the strength of being accessible and coherent in its presentation; chronology, like alphabetic order, has the advantage of presenting a complex set of texts in an immediately understandable and usable format. However, the very appeal of accessibility and seeming coherence has the possibility of encouraging a narrative of “influences,” or an uninformed ideology of “progress” or “evolution” in the history of English dictionaries. As a result, the answer to the basic question “What is an English dictionary?” is mostly retrospective and inferential. Obviously, any history of lexicography must be conversant with lexicographic principles and practice of the period under examination and of the present day.

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A typology of English dictionaries would allow us to both rearrange and preserve the chronological narrative. The scope of this approach is wideranging: there are dictionaries of English for specialized purposes and there are the dictionaries of English that attempt to create, modernize, protect, proselytize, or describe a written standard (or are permutations or combinations of the various typologies), which fall under the broader issue of the intended influence of dictionaries on the user. Other typological variations can be found in dictionaries of English connected to single authors (for instance, a dictionary of the words found in the works of William Blake), or, for example, to literary, scientific or cultural movements; we should also consider dictionaries as they reflect, ignore, or disturb prevailing theories of language, historical, grammatical and cultural. In effect there would be an interlocking structure of chronologies; that is, each designated dictionary type would have its chronology that would then fit into the chain of dictionary events.6 A primary effect of writing a history of English lexicography would bring attention to the inherent mix of diachronicity and synchronicity found in dictionaries, for “the most unabashedly synchronic dictionary over time becomes a period dictionary” (Zgusta 2006, v). The inherent historicity of all dictionaries makes for a challenging and fruitful set of inquiries. The history of any subject has its origins in a present moment that describes or explains a past that will finally culminate in a description or explanation of that present moment. We would be surprised if the scholarship on the intellectual history of a discipline claimed that the current generation had engendered ideas and texts inferior to preceding scholars in the discipline. In addition, the succession through time of material events also provides us with a certain logical progression that promises more than the chronological history can deliver. That which we have in our present seems naturally and logically better than that with which others in the past had to make do; the development of a subject then seems predetermined, as if the succession of events had to occur in the sequence and manner our history describes. This is especially true if we think of the history of lexicography as a chronology or succession of dictionaries. Histories can also be invoked to enhance the prestige of a presentday theory or practice by providing a legitimated genealogy that sets off the theory or practice from other competing theories and practices within the academic subject area. The idea of canonical works is another important consequence of “history.” And yet, histories of academic subjects generally do not hold great interest for most practitioners of the subjects, unless to do “history” means to divide good 6

The first chapter of Béjoint 1994, “Dictionaries and The Dictionary,” includes a rather comprehensive overview of dictionary typology and dictionary as objects of study.

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Chapter One

genealogy from bad. In other words, if a work from the past has found its way onto a present-day list of the well-received, or canonical, then quite naturally a work in the present day will gain some prestige if its content is genealogically linked to the well-received past. In the contemporary discipline of linguistics we find a notable tension between the historically-engaged humanistic approach and the present-day-engaged scientific approach. The history of linguistic ideas as practiced today was not invented by Noam Chomsky (see Chomsky 1966) but he surely gave linguists permission to acknowledge and, in contemporary words, to own a history. By asserting a linguistic genealogy for generative linguistic theory, Chomsky created a ready-made linguistic canon. In this case, the prestige of a current practitioner of linguistic theory conferred canonical status upon a set of ideas and writings three hundred years in the past. From one set of linguistic milestones from the past Chomsky devised an explanatory narrative of linguistic history for the present.7 In the case of lexicography, there is another obstacle to writing a history of dictionaries: in a word, commerce. The demands of selling a product make the dictionary producers wary of any project that may chip away at the built-in authority of the product. Imagine a new and improved product being compared with a product already hundreds of years old, or imagine trade secrets being shared with the world at large. Not surprisingly, publishing houses are loath to allow access to files, notes, and commentaries collected and written in the course of compiling a dictionary.

3. Dictionaries as Arbiters of Standards and Ownership The history of lexicography is also the history of public and personal attitudes toward language. Ideas about standards, correctness, and word-histories, among others, are of primary importance when people consider their expectations for a “good” dictionary. Recently, work in lexicography has revealed a greater interest among scholars in the topic of dictionary users and the uses of dictionaries; the interest in dictionary use has further revealed that we know very little about how people use dictionaries. Most of the studies on dictionary users have focused on learners, but the focus is not all that clear since we do not have a method that separates first-language learners from second-language learners (why consult a dictionary if not to learn?). What we know from the studies and our own anecdotal evidence, including introspection, tells us that an 7

Chomsky (1966) has been harshly criticized by some prominent historiographers of linguistic ideas. I am not concerned here with the acceptance or correctness of Chomsky’s ideas; the nature and specificity of his thesis provided a literary vehicle to advance the awareness of history in the restricted domain of linguistic theory of the time.

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entry that simply records an easily decipherable pronunciation and gives an indication of syntactic function, a standard spelling, and a short paraphrase will suffice for most uses and users of dictionaries. We also know that there are few studies of users and learners and empirical studies are fewer still: see Dolezal and McCreary 1999—in which we found that authors working in a certain discipline do not usually provide cross-referencing to other disciplines that consider or touch upon studying learners, users, readers, and dictionaries, an academic sociology that probably also pertains to studies in the history of English dictionaries—and for a detailed method for eliciting information from users consulting dictionaries and a detailed exploration of the structure of entries and the typology of dictionaries see Wiegand 1998. The little reliable information that exists about the uses of present-day dictionaries is far more than what we know about the uses of say, Robert Cawdrey’s A table alphabeticall (1604), or John Bullokar’s An English expositor (1616), or Nathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum (1730), or even Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English language (1755). However, we can make some general observations. Dictionaries are mostly used for practical reasons by people who want answers for practical questions. The practical dictionary users also want to find the answers as quickly as possible. An alphabetical organization insures that practicality of use is a primary goal. All other notations and notational systems—the use of punctuation, indentation, font, and the like— while capable of carrying nuanced theoretical information of great interest to scholarly readers, have their first effect on the ease of accessing information. For the most part, when people turn their attention to their language, they concern themselves with ideas of correctness and standards, as well as seeking information about the spelling or meaning of an unfamiliar word; without these pragmatic concerns the market for dictionaries would be severely limited. By now the expectations most people have about dictionaries being the arbiters of correctness and authority are supported by the scholarly convention that the history of English lexicography illuminates the triumph of a standard, or standardizing, English dictionary.

3.1. Englishes and The Dictionary of English It might be useful to consider the types of English dictionaries that do not get written or published as a way to reconsider the idea of the progress, or evolution, of dictionaries. The term “Englishes” is used to describe what used to be called “non-native” varieties of English (see Kachru 1975; McArthur 1998, 61–65), and stands for a constellation of attitudes and practices that this current essay can not address for reasons of space. An underlying question implied by the concept of “Englishes” is, who owns the English language? It is a question

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that gets traditionally answered in the form of rhetorics, grammars, and dictionaries of English. The conflict between so-called prescriptive and descriptive approaches can be seen as a battle for ownership that is fought on the textual ground of grammars and dictionaries. There may be Englishes, but an English-speaking community without a grammar or a dictionary can not make a strong claim for ownership. There are comprehensive dictionaries of British, American, and Australian English, but not of any African Englishes, or Indian English, or Singaporean English, or Caribbean English (see Dolezal forthcoming 2006).8 Many dictionaries for these Englishes that do get written concentrate on legal and religious terms, on names of flora and fauna, and on words peculiar to the region or locale. In the earlier texts there is also a linguistically contrastive perspective inherent in the approach to lexicon formation and grammatical description. The complexities of language, culture, and identity in the formation of a dictionary tradition can not receive adequate attention here, so I will return to a central theme concerning some observations on dictionary users and buyers. One interesting impetus for the non-comprehensive dictionaries that do exist is particularly germane to the discussion: there are dictionary users who read literary texts by authors writing in one of the new Englishes. The readers become dictionary users because they require help in understanding the words and phrases of a variety of English unfamiliar to them. In other words, these dictionaries of Englishes are to some degree written for readers of literature. The so-called hard-word tradition of early English lexicography is not limited to a reliquary of obsolete print artifacts. Kachru gives the following illustration from a publication of 1848, J. D. Stocqueler’s The oriental interpreter and treasury of East India knowledge, that describes the need for a dictionary: Every fortnight brings a mail from India, and the intelligence which it imparts is fraught with words which perplex the speeches in Parliament, turning upon Eastern Affairs—the Oriental novels, travels, and statistical works—likewise obscured with terms “caviare to the general.” (qtd. Kachru 2005, 1274)

The full history and tradition of English lexicography must weigh heavily upon any intrepid compiler of a largely undocumented regional or national English. Mostly, comprehensive dictionaries of Indian English or Caribbean English, for example, do not exist because those Englishes have not been 8 Read (1935/2003, 187) makes this point: “Dictionaries develop very late in the history of a language. The forms of a language are set and its vocabulary expands to wide limits even before writing is felt to be a necessity … Anyone, therefore, who attempts to catch speech and to imprison it in books must have some special motives that arise from his time and situation.”

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codified with the thoroughness and comprehension associated with the national standards of North America or Great Britain. The development of a practical grammar may help affirm a distinct regional or national English; moreover, the language users themselves must feel the need to codify and record their own language. The consequences of developing a unified grammar can be quite profound. For when a community codifies and records, it produces the idea of the standard, even if questions of who owns the language and who determines the standard are a continual source of contention. The contentiousness itself does as much to insure the publication of competing grammars and dictionaries. If it is not a linguistic necessity to establish a standard, the practicality of producing a coherent and defined grammar and vocabulary requires something of the kind. For enterprises that require capital investment, for example, the printing of a dictionary, there must be either a source of independent funding or assurance of a sufficient number of customers to create a dictionary market.

4. Concluding Remarks The importance of filling in perceived textual gaps, expanding the bibliographic sources for the English dictionary, and generally tacking an expanded domain onto the early history will depend on establishing a critical history and bibliography of dictionaries and related lexical reference texts. What would a history of English lexicography look like if it were a narrative that not only attempted to describe and explain the succession of dictionaries, but sought also to re-establish a linguistic philology as a means to more fully understand the dictionary as text? The idea of the dictionary is related to the need for interpretation and understanding of written texts. Not far removed from any dictionary definition is a critique of literature. Those dictionaries that in some way foreground the critical response to use of the English language in literature (such as Johnson’s dictionary) seem to attract critical readers; however, all dictionaries are potentially part of the critical transaction between reader and text, even if the exchange is nothing more than an object of the reader’s desire to find order and authority in the universe of discourse.

CHAPTER TWO TO “FINDE WORDES NEWE”: CHAUCER, LEXICAL GROWTH, AND MED FIRST CITATIONS R. CARTER HAILEY Near the end of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales the narrator —and perhaps the poet himself—offers a sly disclaimer before he begins to relate the tales told by the Canterbury pilgrims, requesting his readers’ forbearance lest they be offended by the frank language in some of the tales: Whoso shal telle a tale after a man, He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan, Everich a word, if it be in his charge, Al speke he never so rudeliche and large, Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe, Or feyne thing, or fynde wordes newe. He may nat spare, althogh he were his brother; He moot as wel seye o word as another. (Chaucer 1987, 35, ll.731–38)1

Chaucer’s joke here is multivalent: on one level is the fiction that his narrator is only repeating stories that he heard related orally, on another is the denial that he will “feyne thing,” that is, make things up, which is of course the very nature of storytelling. But I believe there is a more subtle humor, a wink and a nudge, in the phrase “fynde wordes newe.” Here the relevant sense of fynde is, according to the Middle English Dictionary, “To compose or produce by way of artistic endeavor” (s.v. fƯnden sense 23a), and a findere is “(a) One who invents, originates, or introduces.” It is in this sense that Hoccleve famously referred to Chaucer as “The firste fyndere of our faire langage” (qtd. in Cannon 1998, 10). The narrator’s phrase implies the absurdity of finding, that is creating, new words. But throughout his poetic career Chaucer was indeed 1

“Whoever tells another person’s tale must relate it just as it had been told, even if the language is crude or offensive. Otherwise the teller must falsify the tale, or make things up, or invent new words. He can’t hold back, although it were his brother; [otherwise] he might as well say one word as another.”

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self-consciously and systematically engaged in finding “wordes newe” as he steadily translated, borrowed, and adapted Romance vocabulary to embellish his poetic diction. The scale of Chaucer’s contribution to the growth of the English lexicon has been a matter of continuing critical debate, with the extreme positions represented on the one hand by F. N. Robinson’s contention that Chaucer “not only did not invent or alter the grammatical inflections, but he also appears to have added few words to the English vocabulary” (qtd. in Cannon 1998, 16) and on the other by Derek Brewer’s assertion that Chaucer added a “vast number of new words of Latin, French, and Italian origin” (qtd. ibid. 18). Chaucer’s reputation for lexical inventiveness has recently been challenged by Christopher Cannon’s The making of Chaucer’s English. His central contentions are that Chaucer’s language, rather than being innovative, is actually in many respects traditional, and that Chaucer’s status as the “father of English poesy” owes more to self-fashioning linguistic performance than to historical fact. “Set Chaucer’s English,” Cannon insists, “next to the English of any of his predecessors and you may well find it easy to say why Chaucer’s English is better. But you could not, on the other hand, find a difference in degree or kind of linguistic invention between that text and any of Chaucer’s writing that linguistic history could confirm” (2001, 178). It is these last assertions that I wish to challenge. It is certainly and necessarily true that in terms of the kind of lexical invention he employs, Chaucer is traditional. He expands his lexicon by deploying the same arsenal of techniques as did his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors: through borrowing and translation (in Chaucer’s case largely from Latin and French, occasionally from Italian and other languages), and by compounding, affixation, and conversion. This indeed was a cultural project in which numerous English medieval writers and translators were necessarily engaged as they sought to craft a vernacular that could rival the range and expressivity of Latin. Thus the observation that Chaucer was in this sense traditional, while perhaps worth making, is wholly unsurprising. Chaucer could scarcely have employed other than these traditional techniques to expand his lexis without resorting to wholly new categories of word formation. And the question of Chaucer’s rate of innovation compared to his contemporaries, while raised, is not actually addressed in Cannon’s work. Chaucer’s lexical inventiveness is indeed not a matter of kind, but of degree and influence, and this, I believe, is what Lydgate is responding to when he says that Chaucer “Gan oure tonge first to magnifie, | And adourne it with his eloquence” (Lydgate 1998, 3.4242–3). It is the claim of firstness that Cannon is most strenuous in denying, and in a literal sense the point is certainly correct. The production of language, even of a more narrowly defined literary language, is necessarily the cumulative and dynamic product of manifold, multiple, and

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usually unidentifiable “finders.” But writers like Lydgate and Hoccleve who so lavishly praise Chaucer as an originator and embellisher could not have had the wide acquaintance with earlier vernacular Middle English literature that modern scholars have, nor did they possess an OED or MED to show them the error of their originary claims. While earlier views of Chaucer’s originality and lexical inventiveness may require some modification, Chaucer, while clearly not the first or only innovator, continues to deserve considerable credit for expanding and embellishing the English lexicon. As one reviewer succinctly remarks, “it seems a bit churlish to deny his importance simply because he was not the only one doing it or the first one to have done it—claims that no one makes in the first place” (Giancarlo 2001). In order to demonstrate the relative insignificance of Chaucer as a lexical innovator, Prof. Cannon, using the then nearly-completed MED, identified 1,102 Romance words that are, at least apparently, first recorded in Chaucer’s work, but insists that “Chaucer got most of his Romance vocabulary from the store of extant Middle English, not from French or Latin or Italian. More of Chaucer’s Romance vocabulary (2,718 words) was borrowed by his Middle English predecessors than by Chaucer himself . . .” (61). So, using Cannon’s figures, in terms of Chaucer’s Romance vocabulary the score is 1,102 first citations for Chaucer to 2,718 for all his predecessors. While some Chaucerian first usages may eventually be antedated, the number will still be impressive and, set against all the other writers of Middle English in the preceding three hundred years, for a single writer, however prolific, to have newly introduced over a quarter of his quite substantial Romance vocabulary appears to me extraordinary. And Cannon offers no comparative statistics. Did Gower introduce an equal proportion of his Romance vocabulary? Did Dan Michael? Lydgate? Hoccleve? I believe it is safe to assume that they did not. And, as I will argue, even this number materially underestimates the rate and influence of Chaucer’s lexical innovations. All such studies of lexical growth and firstness are dependant on the resources of the Oxford English Dictionary and on the now completed Middle English Dictionary. The problem of reliably determining first citations has received considerable attention, most notably in Jürgen Schäfer’s Documentation in the O.E.D., where he delineates the problems inherent in the search for the “illusory grail of absolute first citations” (5) since “a search for absolute first citations is, methodologically speaking, impossible, since every newly discovered antedating is potentially antedatable in return” (4). Schäfer identifies other difficulties including the literary bias of the OED (13) and its uneven coverage of authors and periods, with the pre-1500 period particularly underrepresented. OED coverage is so uneven that, according to Charlotte Brewer, “basing any hypothesis about the linguistic creativity of individual authors, or of individual periods in the English language, on OED data [is] a

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risky business” (52). Though these issues will continue to be problematic, for the medieval period the problem has been ameliorated if not solved by the completion of the MED, which offers much more thorough, though not comprehensive, coverage of the period 1100–1500. And the availability of its electronic version greatly facilitates this sort of lexical study. But, even supposing that we had comprehensive coverage and therefore more reliable data, there still remains a question of what a first usage—even assuming that it is really first—actually implies. The first cited usage is generally assumed to be the earliest point at which a word can be shown to exhibit a material existence in the English lexicon in the form of ink on paper or vellum, whether in manuscript or print. And it might be reasonably assumed that a first usage is the linguistic well from which all subsequent uses are drawn. Such would appear to be the case with Shakespeare’s coinage assassination in Macbeth. But a word’s first material appearance may in other cases have little or nothing to do with its subsequent history. Precisely because the processes of Middle English lexical expansion were traditional and were employed by countless writers over several centuries, it is not only likely but I believe demonstrable that many “new” English words were in fact coined, created, or borrowed independently on more than one occasion. Charles Barber offers the example of Sir Thomas Elyot who, in The Gouernour (1531), defends his use of Latinate coinages and explains why he has invented the word maturity. What Elyot did not know was that, as the OED demonstrates, the word had previously been used by Barbour (c. 1375) and Lydgate (1426), among others. Barber argues that “If the conditions exist for the coinage of . . . a word, it is quite possible that it will be coined independently by more than one person” (1997, 54–5). The significance of OED and MED first citations can thus be overestimated. Many common words that have early citation dates failed initially to achieve currency or permanence in the English lexicon. In some instances there is a gap of a hundred years or more between the first citation of a word and its next appearance, with little likelihood that the later writer could have known the earlier text. First citations then, particularly those that pre-date the introduction of printing in 1476, may be only partly reliable indicators in determining when a given word became a functional, as opposed to material, part of the English language. A crucial and related question that Cannon poses but does not pursue is “Do those words [Chaucer’s borrowings] survive in later English after Chaucer borrows them?” (36). Very frequently, the answer is “Yes.” When a text is widely reproduced and read, whether in manuscript or print, the likelihood that its lexical innovations will be adopted by other writers increases materially (pun intended). Chaucer’s innovations had a demonstrable influence on the written language at least in part because he was more widely read than, say, Dan

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Michael, whose Ayenbite of inwit Cannon credits with 74 new Romance borrowings later used by Chaucer, with no suggestion that Chaucer knew this text. If we want to develop a better sense of Chaucer’s lexical inventiveness it is imperative that MED entries be looked at not only for “firstness,” but in the details of individual word histories. The most useful part of Cannon’s book is Part 2, which, in his words, “is an index of all of Chaucer’s vocabulary that can be historicized (that is, generally excluding proper nouns) according to the system of Larry Benson’s Glossarial Concordance to the Riverside Chaucer” (5). The index registers 9,117 words, 2,098 of which are, according to the MED, first usages (114, n. 39). In order to test my hypothesis that Chaucer was both lexically inventive and influential, I culled from Cannon’s index all the words Chaucer uses that have their first citations in either the Cursor mundi or the Ayenbite of inwit. I selected these works because they offer two very different sorts of lexical antecedents to Chaucer. The Cursor mundi, dated by the OED to c.1300 and by the MED to c.1325, is, in its most complete recension, a 30,000 line history of the world from the Creation to the Last Judgement, which exists in whole or in part in ten manuscripts representing two distinct traditions, the original Northern and a later Southern form; all but one of these manuscripts date from 1400 or later. The Cursor is useful for my purpose because it is a long and relatively early vernacular text which had a geographically wide circulation, and thus the possibility of significant lexical influence. It is also the single most frequently cited work in the OED, ahead of any single translation of the Bible (Willinsky 1994, 213). I chose the Ayenbite of inwit, first because it’s my favorite Middle English title with the lively hapax ayenbite “remorse” compounded of native English elements, and inwit as a native alternative to conscience. (The title prefigures the sort of native compounds like saywhat “definition” or witcraft “reason” that were coined in the sixteenth-century backlash against the importation of “inkhorn terms.”) The unique (surviving?) manuscript of the Ayenbite is also useful because we know that it was composed by one Dan Michael of Northgate in Kent, belonged to the library of St. Austin at Canterbury, and was completed by Dan Michael himself in 1340. The Ayenbite is not an original work, but a rather clumsy translation of the French Somme des Vices et des Vertus. Since there is no evidence that the text circulated, it is unlikely that its frequently idiosyncratic lexical forms and innovations influenced other writers.2 Thus my two samples are of contrasting kinds—an

2

The possibility cannot of course be wholly discounted that copies were made of Dan Michael’s manuscript which are no longer extant, and it has been argued, on the basis of similarities in The Parson’s Tale, that Chaucer may have known either the Ayenbite or its French source. There are five words in Cannon’s index which, up to 1400, are cited only

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early fourteenth-century text which circulated widely and a mid-century text which circulated perhaps not at all. The corpus I extracted from Cannon’s list of Chaucer’s vocabulary included 205 words first cited by the MED in the Cursor mundi and 125 first cited in the Ayenbite of inwit.3 I found that in a startling number of cases with the Ayenbite and a smaller but significant number of cases with the Cursor, Chaucer is the second cited author. Even more significant, in many instances once Chaucer has taken up a word, whether through direct knowledge of the source text or though reborrowing, translation, or coinage, the word begins to be regularly attested in the work of other writers. Of the 125 words Chaucer uses that have their first citation in the Ayenbite, 69, well over 50%, have their second citation in Chaucer; in an additional 16 cases Chaucer is next but one to the Ayenbite. One of many possible examples is the word imaginacioun, the first cited use occurring in sense 1d: “an image or thought resulting from the operation of this faculty [i.e. that defined in sense 1a as ‘the faculty of forming mental images from sense data and of retaining them either immediately or when recalled from memory’].” Chaucer is then cited with three examples in this sense, all from the Boece; subsequently the word is taken up by Gower and several other writers.4 Similarly, the word complexioun is first cited in MED from the Ayenbite, in sense 3a: “Of persons: (a) constitution or general nature resulting from the blending of the four ‘humors’ in varying proportions; temperament or character as produced by the predominance of one of the four ‘humors.’” After Chaucer uses complexioun in this sense in the Knight’s and Parson’s Tales, it appears in the works of Gower, Trevisa, Pecock, and many others. This sort of example could be repeated many times over with words like comparisoun, compassioun, defacen, dispeiren, and makere; but I want to extend my claims for Chaucer’s lexical influence even further. It is the nature of what might be called the illusory grail of first citations that they are unitary whereas we all recognize that words are polyvalent. That is, a first citation can represent only a single sense of a word, and often, as with Dan Michael’s use of imaginacioun, it may not represent what will become the word’s primary sense. Expanding the semantic range of a word by giving it new significations ought equally to be considered lexical innovation. In the case of imaginacioun, a word Chaucer uses on thirty-one occasions, the MED distinguishes five main senses, with a total of seventeen subsidiary meanings. Those uneasily grouped under sense 5 are all nonce uses, with a in the Ayenbite and Chaucer: afor-yen, basilicok, charmeresse, clom, and shipe. Whether this indicates Chaucer’s knowledge of the Ayenbite or convergent innovation is unclear. 3 See the appendix for a full listing of these words. 4 An earlier citation, from the Rolle Psalter, has a composition date of 1340, but occurs only in a manuscript dated to 1500.

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single quotation each, illustrating “5(a) The painted representation of a person; (b) reflection of light from a shiny surface; (c) a figure of speech.” Discounting these, Chaucer is the first cited author for nine of the remaining fourteen senses, including the primary sense 1a, “the faculty of forming mental images from sense data.” This sense and three others—1c, “the power of forming mental images of things not experienced,” 2a, “The experiencing of illusions,” and 3a, “planning, scheming, devising”—are all particularly productive, with numerous subsequent citations for each, and all nine Chaucerian senses of the word have later citations. I certainly would not argue that for each individual sense Chaucer is the direct influence on all subsequent users of that meaning of the word; the processes of reborrowing and recoinage are not limited to Chaucer. But I would assert that when the same phenomenon is observed in numerous entries, it is reasonable to conclude that Chaucer’s writing did have a real effect in expanding the expressive capacity of the lexicon. I have admittedly chosen some of the more dramatic examples to illustrate this phenomenon, but of the 125 words in the Ayenbite corpus, Chaucer is the first cited author of at least one sense of the word for 70 of them. Not surprisingly, the evidence from the Cursor mundi corpus is not as dramatic as that of the Ayenbite, but considering the temporal gap and wider circulation of the former, is still highly suggestive. Of the 205 words Chaucer uses that have their MED first citation in the Cursor, Chaucer is the second cited author in thirty-two instances (or about fifteen per cent) and the third cited author in an additional twenty cases. In the former category are the nouns concorde, extorcioun, fore-sight, and intervalle and the adjectives folish, positif, and unhappi. The most interesting word in this category is poete. Perhaps indicative of the success of Chaucer’s alleged self-fashioning, the word achieves a permanent place in the lexicon only after Chaucer uses it (there are ten occurrences in his work), even though its first citation is from the Cursor. But as is typical of Chaucer’s habit of innovation, he is the first cited author for the related words poetical and poetrie. These words would almost certainly have come into the language at some point; but the expansion of the range of terms from the word poete is rightly to be credited to Chaucer and not the Cursor mundi. Not only does Chaucer appear to be the originator of some sense of numerous words that first appear in the Cursor or the Ayenbite, but frequently these uses are judged by MED lexicographers to constitute the primary senses of the word. (First citations are often found in sub-senses of a word, rather than in one or more of its primary meanings.) Of the 102 instances where Chaucer is cited first in at least one sense of a word which has its first usage in the Cursor, in 25 cases it is in sense 1 or 1a. Examples of this sort include the nouns conquest, fortune, generacioun, opinioun, and vicar. This phenomenon is

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similarly observed in relation to the Ayenbite where, of the 70 instances where Chaucer is the first cited in some sense of a word, in 20 cases it is in sense 1 or 1a; examples include the nouns aboundaunce, detraccioun, novice, perseveraunce, and temperaunce. In a total of 39 instances, Chaucer is cited first in one of the primary meanings. What then is the significance of this observation? Have the MED lexicographers participated in myth-making—as Cannon accuses the OED of doing—by ordering entries so that Chaucerian usages are deemed primary simply because they are from Chaucer? Or is it rather that Chaucer’s habitual lexical innovation, not only in coining or borrowing new words, but in the innovative use of previously coined words, fills gaps in the lexicon and, because of the wide circulation of his texts, leads the meanings he develops to become primary meanings? In discussing the expansion of the English lexicon, I have found it useful to adopt the term “punctuated equilibrium,” which Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould used to describe their observation that evolution does not proceed at a regular pace, but by fits and starts, sometimes quite rapidly, sometimes much more slowly (1972). The growth of the English lexicon has proceeded very much in this fashion, a lexical punctuated equilibrium where events like the Norman conquest— almost as cataclysmic as the extinction of the dinosaurs— have alternated with periods of more stable growth. The contribution of individual writers in this process, most notably Shakespeare, has undoubtedly been exaggerated. But contrary to what appears to be the new orthodoxy, that individual speakers or writers have very little overall effect on the language, Chaucer does have a large and demonstrable effect in the expansion of the English lexicon. While Chaucer was not in fact the “The firste fyndere of our faire langage” he was a significant finder nevertheless—indeed he was the first to use the word findere in the MED’s sense 2a: “One who invents, originates, or introduces.”

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Appendix The following tables, drawn from Cannon’s Index, list items from Chaucer’s vocabulary which have their first MED citation in either the Cursor mundi or the Ayenbite of inwit.5 * A single asterisk indicates words for which Chaucer is the next citation, regardless of sense or sub-sense. ** A double asterisk indicates words for which Chaucer is the third cited author. Cursor Words **abusion n.; advocat n.; allouen v.; along adj.; an-ende adv.; apart adv.; avoue n.; bak-wardes adv.; bark n.; bible n.; biscornen v.; bitraishen v.; bleu n.; botme n.; bran n.; canoun n.1; case n.1; char n.2; chevishen v.; **cloistrer n.; concepcioun n.; concluden v.; *concorde n.; conqueste n.; conveien v.; corden v.1; costen v.; crag n.; crucifien v.; cut n.2; debat n.; derknesse n.; *discorden v.; *dispreisen v.; dissencioun n.; don adj.; emelle prep.; **emprise n.; enclinen v.; exil n1.; exilen v.; *extorcioun n. a; feithful adj.; firre n.1; *fleming ger.; *folish adj.; *fonne n.; *fore-sight n.; forgen v.; *forken v.; forth-with adv.; fortune n.; frouncen v.; generacioun n.; gentilnesse n.; gomme n.; grubben v.; **harminge ger.; herberwinge ger.; ho interj.; honginge ger.; hotte n.; housinge ger. (sense 1d); idiote n.; impossible adj.; *intervalle n.; *jogelerie n.; kepinge ger.; large adv.; lastinge prep.; lightnen v.1; like adv.; likli adj.; logginge ger.; madden v.; man-slaughter n.; meselrie n.; mesuren v.; meteli adj.; middes n.; *mirinesse n.; *misledinge ger.; *monstre n.; mortherer n.; murmuren v.; **nai adv.; neverthe-les adv.; **noteful adj.; **opinioun n.; **osanna interj.; oure-self pron.; outtaken prep.; overrechen v.; pale adj.; paramoure n.; **paregal adj.; *passed ppl. adj.; penaunte n.; **Philistienes n.; plaine adv.; planen v1.; plenere adv.; *poete n.; pointel n.; polishen v.; porcioun n.; *positif adj.; prentis n.; *pretorie n.; principallie adv.; progenie n.; prologe n.; quantite n.; rabbi n.; rape n.2; raumpen v.; raunsouninge ger.; ravishinge ger.; reclaimen v.; *rehersinge ger.; 5

Cannon compiled his Index before the MED had reached completion; there are thus several understandable discrepancies in the last few letters. Wreking is wrongly attributed to Ayenbite; its first citation being in the Cursor; venial (adj.) is attributed to the Cursor rather than to the Ayenbite; water-foul (n.) is given a first citation from the Cursor, but where it appears (s.v. water 2c.(b)), there is no Cursor citation; weier (n.) “one who weighs” is given as a Cursor first citation, but the earliest evidence is in fact from surnames, followed by Chaucer.

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*reneiinge ger.; rennere n.; *renomen v.; **Romain adj.; sadli adv.; Samaritane n.; satisfaccioun n.; scalle n.; scarsnesse n.; scripture n.; seintuarie n.; *selinesse n.; sermouninge ger.; shrouden v.; significacioun n.; *sik n.; sin prep.; *siser n.; **skilful adj.; sobrenesse n.; sounden v.2; spar-hauk n.; sparre n.; spitous adj.; **spittinge ger.; springinge ger.; square adj.; stablenesse n.; *stakeren v.; stallen v.; stank n.; stature n.; sted-fast adv.; **stile n.2; **stoken v.2; *stroiere n.; surfet n.; suspect adj.; tal adj.; taste n.1; teme n.2; tenderli adv.; thinkinge ger .; title n.; to adj.; transfiguren v.; translaten v.; tregetour n.; trompen v.; uncoveren v.; *unhappi adj.; unknouen v.; *unmanhede n.; *unstedfastnesse n.; **untold ppl.; uprisen v.; **vale n.; vicar n.; **virago n.; visitinge ger. ; walkinge ger.; **wandringe ger.; *wantinge ger.; *wantoun adj.; warderobe n.; warninge ger.1; wart n.; wastinge ger.; waterles adj.; weik adj.; werd n.; werreien v.; **wifles adj.; wikkednesse n.; wili adj.; *wish n.; witnessinge ger.; wittinge ger1.; **wlatsom adj.; *woful adj.; wondringe ger.; wrekinge ger.; yevere n.; yon adj.; youres pron. Ayenbite Words abiding ger.; *aboundaunce n.; abstinence n.; *actif adj.; adversarie n.; *aforyen prep.; **amonesten v.; *arising ger.; **aspiinge ger.; *astonen v.; *attempre adj.; *b n.; *basilicok n.; *bideuen v.; *bilongen v.; blasfemen v.; *c n.; chaffaren v.; *charmeresse n.; chaumberere n.; *clom n.1; *colerik adj.; *comparisoun n.; *comparisounen v.; *compassioun n.; *complexioun n.; *condempnen v.; *condescenden v.; *consentinge ger.; *constaunce n.; *contrarie adj.; conversacion n.; *cord n.; corrumpen v.; **corrupcioun n.; corrupten v.; couche n.; curiousli adv.; *defacen v.; *despeiren v.; *detraccioun n.; devoutli adv.; *difference n.; *diligence adj.; *diligent adj.; *diligentli adv.; *disordeine adj.; *distemperaunce n.; ecco n.; *entermes n.; fervent adj.; finen v.3; *flatour n. ; **forswering ger.; **foryeting ger.; **fructifien v.; *ful-filling ger.; *generalli adv.; *gessinge ger.; **glorifien v.;*grauntinge ger.; *harmful adj.; **hidousli adv.; **hiene n.; honestliche adv.; humour n.; *imaginacioun n.; innocence n.; innocent adj.; lap-winke n.; liinge ger.2; *linx n.; *luxurie n.; *magnanimite n.; *magnificence n.; makere n.; *mene adj.2; merciful adj.; *musen v.; *novice n.; *oninge ger.; *ordeneli adv.; patrimoine n.; *periousli adv.; perle n.2 *perseveraunce n.1; plentevousli adj.; *pletinge ger.; **possessioun n.; *pouringe ger1.; *preterit adj.; prudence n.; **purveiinge ger.; *querele n.; rebellen v.; *resemblen v.1; **riotous adj.; sauce n.; *scallede adj.; *scome n.; **sengen v.; shadwen v.; *shipe n.; **simplesse n.; sinnere n.; siren n.; *slaknesse n.; sobre adj.; sobreli adv.; *sophistrie n.; soverain adj.; *spiritualli adv.; *suspecious adj.; **swinkere n.; *tache n.3; tappe n.1;

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temperaunce n.; *unconninge adj.; *unjoinen v.; *untreuth n.; venial adj.; **willinge ger.; *wittingli adv.; worshipful adj.; yelding ger.

CHAPTER THREE THE EMERGENCE OF LEXICOLOGY IN RENAISSANCE ENGLISH DICTIONARIES GABRIELE STEIN Let me begin with a brief introduction to early English lexicography to outline the period I shall focus on. Lexicographical activities involving English reach back well over a thousand years to the Anglo-Saxon period. The first Latin–Old English glossaries that have come down to us date from the eighth century. There is a gradual development in size and arrangement: alphabetical order moved from observing the initial letter only to one that took account of subsequent letters in each word, easing the consulting burden of the AngloSaxon monk and scholar. A second type of lexicographical work already compiled in Anglo-Saxon times is the so-called “class-glossary” or “vocabulary,” meeting the needs of teachers and learners alike. A class-glossary lists classes of words that relate to specific topics, e.g. the parts of the body, animals, instruments, etc. The item arrangement is thus topical, not alphabetical. The compilation of alphabetical glossaries and topical class-glossaries continues during the Middle English period. In addition, there are highly interesting new lexicographical ventures. Not surprisingly, after the conquest of England by the Normans, French became a spoken vernacular in medieval England and entered the lexicographical scene: in the Nominale sive verbale in gallicis cum expositione eiusdem in anglicis, for instance, we have a first French–English word list. Specialized class-glossaries appear for legal terms and for plant names; these could be regarded as the beginnings of bilingual English Fachsprachen lexicography. Manuscripts which I discovered in the British Library reveal that apart from nominales (bilingual lists of Latin nouns matched by English), there were also verbales, bilingual Latin–English lists of verbs, and there were attempts at bilingual synonym collections. In one manuscript, the Tractatus sinonimorum, the language order is even English– Latin (Stein 1985, 57–65). Lexicographical documentation for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is rather scarce, but for the fifteenth century we have not only a good number of class-glossaries but also the first works that qualify as full dictionaries in the

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modern sense of the word, though the term dictionary itself is not yet common: the earliest Latin–English work, the Medulla grammatice, is followed by two English–Latin dictionaries, the Promptorium parvulorum and the Catholicon anglicum. The manuscripts date from 1440 and 1483 respectively. The century ends with the first printed dictionaries: 1499 is the year of publication of the English–Latin Promptorium parvulorum and 1500 marks the publication of the Latin–English Ortus vocabulorum. The beginnings of dictionary compilation in England thus embrace two languages only, Latin and English. The pairing of these two languages continues throughout the sixteenth century, and the dictionaries develop into full-size desk volumes. The most striking feature of English lexicography in the sixteenth century, however, is the coming of age of the vernaculars. There are several dictionaries matching English and French so that we have an arrangement English first, French second, and French first, translated into English. As to Welsh, Spanish and Italian, for which the sixteenth century produced bilingual dictionaries with English, the common characteristic is that the foreign tongue from the point of view of the English user is the first language which is rendered into the mother tongue. German and Dutch are not yet paired with English directly. But there are other types of language learning tools in which German and Dutch figure. These are the polyglot dictionaries which developed and became very popular, linking up to eleven languages (Stein 1988, 1989; Waentig 2003). The more learned polyglot dictionaries are the ones developed from the Latin dictionary of Calepino, and by Junius and Minsheu. The compilers of the more practicallyoriented pocket-size booklets are mostly unknown. The sixteenth century thus witnessed a flourishing of bi- and multilingual dictionaries. It is towards the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century that monolingual English lexicography develops. The publication of Robert Cawdrey’s Table alphabeticall in 1604 is traditionally regarded as the beginning of monolingual English dictionary-making (for the apparently earlier work discussed in Osselton 1986, see now Lancashire 2004b). Cawdrey’s Table alphabeticall was followed by John Bullokar’s English expositor in 1616, and Henry Cockeram’s English dictionarie, published in 1623, is the first monolingual work actually called a dictionary. On the basis of this brief introduction to the development of English lexicography, I can now delimit the period which I shall focus upon and which I referred to in the title as “Renaissance”: it covers the fifteenth century up to the first half of the seventeenth century. What I would like to do in this paper is explore (1) whether the early English compilers had a concept of the vocabulary of a language and if so, what this concept was;

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(2) whether there are indications in the prefaces to the dictionaries that the word stock of a language is not a miscellaneous assemblage of items but rather a variously structured complex; (3) whether the actual treatment of words in the dictionaries includes areas where compilers were not only aware of interrelations between words but also developed a descriptive style to draw their users’ attention to them; (4) the kinds of lexical interrelations of which these early lexicographers were aware. Our concern is the English language. This might lead us to expect that dictionaries in which English figures as the language of the translation equivalents may be less promising for our purposes than dictionaries where English is the headword language and the compiler thus concentrates on his mother tongue. A complicating factor that will need special attention is the possible influence of Latin lexicography on English dictionary-making: lexicographical treatments of Latin did already focus on certain interrelations between lexical items. One of the questions is therefore whether English compilers copied and imitated what they found in the Latin sources. We now come to lexicology, the central part in my title. Various definitions have been put forward, some more satisfactory than others. My own definition is as follows: lexicology is that linguistic discipline which studies the lexicon of a language. Lexicon is here used as a term which is more comprehensive than vocabulary. Vocabulary is used to denote the system formed by the sum total of all the lexical items that a language possesses at a particular point in time. As speakers of a language we all know that we can at any time go beyond what is already in existence in our language. On the basis of the existing word material we can form new words, or transfer senses of words to mean something different, and thus create new units of the vocabulary. So beyond the actual vocabulary of a language, there is the potential vocabulary. The term lexicon is used to cover both the actual and the potential vocabulary. The lexical system is an open system. A lexical item, which in many cases is equivalent to a word, is a linguistic unit which results from the association of a particular meaning with a particular string of sounds, cast into a grammatical mould which determines its grammatical use. A lexical item is thus simultaneously a semantic, phonological, and grammatical unit. The grammatical element of the lexical item is usually taken to be its word class. Word-class membership is mostly thought of as a mere grammatical specification. This is an unfortunate mental shortcut. When a

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meaning-sound association is for example cast into the mould of a noun, we are not only given its grammatical properties, for instance whether it is countable or uncountable—its possible syntactical functions—but also its common lexical properties. Its general lexical meaning may for instance be that it is a name referring to an object, a human being, an abstract phenomenon. In the case of verbs, the word class is linked to transitivity or intransitivity which correlates with semantic autonomy. Part-of-speech classifications are in fact lexico-grammatical classifications which constitute the basic and foremost structural network between lexical items. The linguistic description of a lexical item would typically take into account: (1) the phonological/graphemic structure (e.g. monosyllabic, bisyllabic, etc.) (2) the semantic structure (e.g. monosemous, polysemous, metonymic, etc.) (3) the lexico-grammatical structure (e.g. names of containers are typically nouns) (4) the morphological structure (e.g. primary or secondary—derived, compounded, etc.—words) (5) the context of use (e.g. stylistic, regional specification) (6) in the case of a historical study, the word origin. Lexicologists are interested in whether there are interdependencies between these parameters—whether monosyllabic words, for instance, tend to be primary words, polysemous and stylistically coloured. Their overall aim, however, is not so much a particular lexical item, but rather that which is generalizable and holds for a good number of items. Are there recurrent correlations between certain meanings and morphological structure? Take for example the nouns crook, rogue, snob, and thief. All are primary, that is underived words; all denote a human being with a slightly derogatory meaning. By adding the suffix -ish, we can form an adjective with the meaning “showing the negative qualities associated with the noun.” By contrast, we may note the positive appreciation of a person’s behaviour that results from the use of the suffix -ly as in fatherly, kingly, motherly, painterly. Yet the lexicologist’s interest will not rest with the findings of such correlations and interdependencies. Their place and their function within the whole of the lexicon will also be focussed upon. There are for instance other names for human individuals whose behaviour is not liked: a burglar, a cheat, a liar, a pickpocket, a slanderer, etc. These nouns do not lend themselves to adjective derivatives in -ish: *burglarish, *cheatish, *liarish, *pickpocketish,

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*slandererish. Why is it that we cannot apply the same word-formation process to these nouns? Because they are all secondary, that is derived nouns? Let us now, as investigating lexicologists, turn to the early bilingual English dictionaries. The decisive lexicographical step between the earlier alphabetical word lists and class-glossaries on the one hand, and the first English dictionaries on the other, is in coverage and size: the dictionaries include all the parts of speech and list many thousands of words. Just to give an idea, the Medulla grammatice registers some 17,000 lexical items, and the Promptorium parvulorum some 12,000. Did the compilers have or develop a concept of the lexicon of a language as a whole? The medieval word lists, the nominales and class-glossaries, represented sections of the Latin and English vocabularies, structured fractions insofar as they constituted either lexico-grammatical sets (nominales, verbales, synonyms) or thematic groupings. The change in size did not really lead the compilers to adding up the various sections to a perceived whole. The very names of the first English dictionaries are indicative in this respect: the term dictionary was not yet in common use and though it is first used in the title of a work in 1538, The dictionary of Syr Thomas Elyot, this title was, four years later, changed to Bibliotheca Eliotae in the subsequent edition. The early compilers referred to their works as medulla “marrow”; promptorium “storeroom, repository”; abcedarium “ABC-book”; thesaurus “treasury”; manipulus “handful”; silva “forest”; and bibliotheca “library.” None of these colourful expressions comes close to denoting a collection of dictiones which a compiler might regard as a complete inventory. Comprehensiveness becomes a lexicographical issue and it takes two different forms. These are interestingly linked with Latin and with the vernaculars respectively. In the case of Latin, compilers stress the coverage of their work by specifying that they have included all they found in their source authors. In the case of the vernaculars, however, the question of allinclusiveness is not only raised but also answered. John Palsgrave is the first English lexicographer and lexicologist to have tackled the issue, as early as 1530. In the introduction to his English–French dictionary he claims that his lists will contain all the words of the English language (Book III, fos. ir, xvir). Yet towards the end he admits that some words might be missing (Book III, fos. ccccr, lxiv). In the section that deals with the formation of nouns (Book III, fo. xvv) he argues that new words could always be formed according to the rules specified by him. He regarded entering all these word-formations into his dictionary as superfluous. He thus seems to have grasped the difference between the vocabulary and the lexicon of a language discussed earlier. No doubt then that he had some concept of the lexicon. This conceptualization may have been the basis for his trying to find or invent a word for it. He called his compilation

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“the frenche vocabular” at one point (Book I, fo. 4v), and “the frenche Vocabuler” and “the sayd Vocabulyst” at another (Book II, fo. lixv). The other compiler of a bilingual vernacular dictionary to have thought about the same issue is John Florio. He discussed the question of whether a dictionary can be all-inclusive in his Italian–English dictionary of 1598—“If any man aske whether all Italian wordes be here?”—and pointed out that this could not be the case because “daily” new words are “inuented” (Florio 1598, sig. b1r). Maybe this lexicological insight underlay the title of his dictionary, A worlde of wordes, suggesting an immense and open realm of words. Palsgrave and Florio were thus aware of the openness of the lexical system. Neologisms were not isolated but linked to the vocabulary as formations on the basis of the existing word stock. The early lexicographers achieved the large increase in size which differentiated their work from that of earlier glossarists by exploiting and putting together more and more material found in other dictionaries and by reading and excerpting works of “good authors” as well as books on specialized subjects, such as law, logic, physic, herbs, fishes, etc. They had to select lexical items and they had to present them in some order. Word selection and lexicographical arrangement reveal that the early compilers were well aware of various types of structural and semantic relations between words and of different layers of vocabulary. It is the lexico-grammatical structure that is the most striking and most consistently observed vocabulary arrangement in the earliest dictionaries. The first English–Latin and the first English–French dictionary in the history of English focus on the word-class structure in the vocabulary. Word-class membership is the overriding organisational principle; alphabetical order is secondary. The unknown compiler of the Promptorium parvulorum distinguished between “verba” and “nomina,” and under the latter he lumped together not only nouns and adjectives, but also adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. John Palsgrave in his English–French “vocabulist” starts with substantives and then proceeds with adjectives, pronouns, numerals, verbs, participles, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions, and interjections. With Palsgrave the metalanguage is English; in the Medulla grammatice, the Promptorium parvulorum, the Catholicon anglicum, and the Ortus vocabulorum it is Latin. This is the reason why Palsgrave is credited in the OED with the first use of a number of grammatical terms in English, e.g. adverb, article, interjection, numeral, and pronoun. Both dictionaries start with the users’ mother tongue, English, which is then translated into Latin or French. It is interesting to note that two later dictionaries in which the vocabulary structure of word class plays an important role are also English-first dictionaries. It thus looks as if early compilers of dictionaries for productive,

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encoding use gave prominence to the lexico-grammatical structurization of the vocabulary. The dictionaries in question are John Withals’ A shorte dictionarie for yonge begynners of 1553, where we have an adjective list in addition to a thematic arrangement, and John Rider’s Bibliotheca scholastica of 1589. Rider tells his users that the headwords are arranged in the following order: “First I put the verbe (if it haue any) thӁ the participle, after the Nownes substantiues, and adjectiues, and lastly the Adverbs” (Rider 1589, sig. *4v). The early lexicographers were to a greater or lesser degree also aware that the words in their dictionaries had a different status with respect to their linguistic structure, their currency, their regional occurrence, their subject field appurtenance, and their linguistic origin. John Palsgrave, Sir Thomas Elyot, Richard Howlet, and Thomas Cooper, for instance, mark phrases, sayings and proverbs, distinguishing clearly between words and longer lexical items. Here is an example from Richard Howlet’s Abcedarium anglico latinum: “Cuckowes note by circumlocution, wher one can synge but one tune, or tel one tale. Monologium.” Right from the first bilingual dictionary, the Medulla grammatice, onwards, we find occasional comments on currency: that a certain Latin word or grammatical form is not in use or little used. For the vernaculars, comments on old or dated words are often more explicit. John Palsgrave in Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse (1530) not only indicates that a particular lexical item is no longer in use: in quite a number of instances he identifies, in addition, a specific old use of a word by a specific English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer or John Lydgate. There are even cases where he describes temporally marked lexical use for Old French and the Roman de la rose (Stein 1997, 174–193). Peter Levins explained his inclusion of old words in the first English–Latin rhyming dictionary, the Manipulus vocabulorum, as follows: note, that when as some words here contained be either barbarous, straunge, or fallen out of vse, we haue not much put them in as imitable, but rather that the rude may reforme their tong, and that the Readers of suche bookes, may here learne what the wordes meane, and for that end we haue interpreted such words, as kirke, church, myrke, darke, ken, know, and such other. (Levins 1570, sig. ¶2v)

Regional variation in the use of lexical items is mentioned for the vernacular only. The unknown compiler of the Promptorium parvulorum draws his readers’ attention to the fact that his speech is that of Norfolk (Promptorium parvulorum 1440/1908, col. 3), and John Palsgrave marks a number of English lexical items as “northern” or “farre northern” (Stein 1997, 82–89). Richard Howlet’s dialect words are also described as northern (Stein 2006, 27). Local use in Cambridgeshire is marked by John Baret and Thomas Thomas. For French,

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Palsgrave’s specifications are more precise: the regional areas are Paris, Normandy, Picardy, and Gascony. Claudius Hollyband in his French–English dictionary includes lexical items common in Languedoc, in Picardy, in Normandy, in Gascony, in Bourbon, in Poitiers. And finally, John Florio indicates that some lexical items are used in Tuscany and Lombardy, while others are more precisely attributed to usage in Florence, Venice, Genoa, or Rome. The occasional marking of borrowings as going back to Greek or Hebrew is a feature of the early word lists. This practice, applied randomly only, is continued in some Renaissance dictionaries. In bilingual vernacular dictionaries we occasionally find references to borrowings from other vernaculars. John Palsgrave and John Baret identify French borrowings in English. Claudius Hollyband marks some borrowings as Italian and Spanish, and John Florio in his Italian–English dictionary points out that some lexical items were taken over from French or Spanish. One compiler who is quite systematic in his collection and marking of borrowings is John Minsheu in the 1599 revision of Richard Perceval’s Bibliotheca hispanica. He not only identifies “Arabicke and Moorish” words within the Spanish–English dictionary by means of a dagger, but also provides a table of such words “vsuall in the Spanish tongue” at the end of the dictionary (Minsheu 1599, 384–91). In the endeavour to provide and explain more and more words for their readers the early lexicographers turned to specialist books so that a considerable number of terms from various subject fields were included in their dictionaries. These lexical additions were adequately highlighted and described on the title pages. Many were also explicitly marked within the dictionary. For some, the specific context or situation in which they are used are described, as in this example from Sir Thomas Elyot: Acceptilatio, an acceptaunce, a word of the lawe, whyche hapneth in this wyse. One sayth to an other, Art thou contented with that that I haue promysed the? or that by my bargain I owe to the? The other saith, ye I am contented. This is Acceptilatio.

There is thus clear evidence that various functional styles in the use of lexical items were already recognized in early Renaissance dictionaries. At the same time, the implication of the practice of singling out differing lexical use is clearly that the early lexicographers considered the bulk of their word lists to comprise the current common core of the language. Functional styles are also linked to the Renaissance concept of copia, the rhetorical ideal of variation and richness of expression. This is reflected in assembling lexical items which are synonymous or at least similar in meaning. The stylistic principle may even have guided some of the early lexicographers in

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their compilation of words. It is not only assumed but it has also quite extensively been shown that one of the working methods for the compilation of English–Latin dictionaries consisted in inverting Latin–English works. This accounts in part for the striking headword structure for English entries. The headword proper may be followed by a number of synonyms or lexical paraphrases which functioned as equivalents in a Latin–English dictionary, as in these examples: “ffreel and brokyl, or brythel: ffragilis” (Promptorium parvulorum 1440/1908); “a Babie: a yong childe: a puppet, or image like a childe. Pupus” (Baret 1573). What we do not know, at least in most cases, is whether the English compiler had a Latin–English source book where fragilis and pupus, for instance, were translated by the whole sequence or whether the compiler collected translation equivalents for fragilis and pupus from various sources and then put them together as the headword part for the Latin words. Undoubtedly, both these methods of compilation will have been used so that there will have been some deliberate attempt at bringing together lexical items for English which are very close in meaning. But the principle of offering copia of lexical expression is also present in the translation part of these Renaissance bilingual dictionaries, and in some cases it has awe-inspiring dimensions. Cases in point are for instance the entries battle and to cry in the Catholicon anglicum. The author was indebted to John of Garland’s Synonyma and applied Garland’s method throughout his own work. In some instances, he was content with simply supplying synonymous equivalents in Latin for the English headword, in others such synonymous equivalents were explicitly differentiated. This can be illustrated with the following examples: Dronkyn; ebrius, ad diem multum bibisse signat ebriosus, et semper bibere signat temulentus. Dumme; mutus, elinguatus sine lingua est, elinguis habet linguam set [sc. sed] eius caret vsu. (Catholicon anglicum 1483/1881, contractions expanded silently)

We thus have implicit synonymy as well as explicit synonymy. What is only a part of the Catholicon anglicum becomes the very essence in Simon Pelegromius’ Synonymorum sylva, the first English–Latin synonym dictionary, studied most recently by Werner Hüllen (2004, 142–146). John Florio for his part describes his dictionary on the title page as “most copious.” And “most copious” it is. On every page the reader is enthralled by the range of English equivalents he provides for the Italian headwords. The sequence in the listing of these synonyms suggests a scale from the formal and neutral to the more informal, slangy style and from the simple lexical item to idiomatic phrases. Here are two examples:

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Chapter Three Leccardo, Leccardone, a glutton, a friand, a gurmand, a lickerish fellow, a gullie gut. Pelare, to pull, or pluck as they doe the feathers of fowle, to scald as a hog, to vnskin, to singe, to pull off the haire or skinne of any thing. Also to gall the skin off. Also by a metaphor, to pill, to pare, to spoile, to pull or take from any man by hooke or crooke.

Florio clearly differentiates between the literal and the transferred sense of a word. Other compilers, too, describe transferred language use as “by circumlocution” or “by translation,” for instance Howlet: Barley bunne gentleman, whyche is by circumlocution meaned by suche ryche nigardes as lyue wyth barley breade, or otherwise hardlye. Hordiarius. Touche the quycke, by translation the matter in dede. Resecare ad uiuum.

In longer dictionary entries figurative lexical expressions were listed towards the end of the entry. This takes us to the question of how the early lexicographers dealt with polysemous words. In what order did they record the various senses of a lexical item? A close study of the dictionaries shows that recording the general sense first and then more specialized one(s) was not uncommon. “Also,” “moreover,” and “sometimes” were used as sense discriminators. In the case of John Rider’s Bibliotheca scholastica we even have an explicit account of his practice. The Bibliotheca scholastica is one of the most systematically organized Renaissance dictionaries. For English, alphabetical order holds for the headwords, and word-class hierarchy is criterial for subordinate entries. With respect to the arrangement of the Latin equivalents Rider tells his readers that In the Latine vnder the English I generally obserue this order. First I place the proper Latine word vnder the figure of 1: then the figuratiue or translate vnder the figure of 2: and lastly those that be obsolete, or words out of vse, vnder the figure of 3. (Rider 1589, sig. *3v)

We thus conclude that Renaissance English lexicographers were aware of, and distinguished, external lexical relations, that is, those holding between different lexical items, and internal lexical relations, that is those holding within a polysemous lexical item, between lexical units (Cruse 1986, 76). But we are not yet at the end of the range of lexical structures recognized and recorded by early English compilers of bilingual dictionaries. Wordformation structures are quite conspicuous. The style of description as well as the explicitness with which word-formation structures are given varies from

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dictionary to dictionary. Word-formation structures for Latin are typically supplied as an analysis of the headword or in the form of run-on entries where diminutives may be specified or deverbal noun suffixes may be listed, as in these entries from the Ortus vocabularum (1500/1968): Amplifico as to make large. Tor. trix. et tio verbale. Caupo onis. a tauernere. Caupona, vxor eius. Cauponula, diminutiuNJ. Clitus a um. idest gloriosus nobilis. sed non est in vsu. et componitur cum in, vt inclitus a um. idest valde gloriosus.

Some compilers also used derivational relationships for the order of their headwords. The compiler of the Catholicon anglicum, for instance, had a certain predilection for antonyms and reversatives: so clean is followed by unclean, cunning by uncunning, to close by to unclose, to cover by to uncover. The awareness and observation of word-formational dependencies often resulted in a clustering of lexical items with the same stem. The lexicographical macrostructure thus includes quite a number of pockets of word families. In dictionaries in which English is the headword language, the word family principle is often expanded to include idiomatic phrases as well as synonyms. In Baret’s Alvearie, for instance, the entries following the headword to backbite are: A detractour: an ill reporter: a backbiter: a slaNJderer A telltale: a priuy backbiter Backbiting: slaundering Backbitingly, or slaunderously.

For the vernaculars there are also explicit descriptions of word-formation patterns. Elsewhere, in two separate studies on John Palsgrave and Peter Levins, I explored the beginnings of contrastive English word-formation (Stein 1987 and 1999). So I will confine myself here to mentioning one pattern as it was formulated as early as 1570 by Peter Levins. At the end of the list of words ending in -able (we recall that Levins’ dictionary is the first rhyming dictionary for English) he writes: There be many other in Able, deriued of Englishe verbes, almost as many as there be verbs, which are only formed by putting too Able at the ende of the

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Chapter Three English terme, as these that folow, and such other, whose latin is in bilis, & so do signifie, that a thing is cõuenient, mete, fit, apt, worthy or able to be done, as, Eatable, comestibilis, bile. meet or fit to be eaten. Treatable, worthy, or able to be treated vpon.

No review of the emergence of lexicology in early bilingual English dictionaries could of course be complete without discussion of other features such as homonyms or cross-references which are interesting and notable, especially in the more comprehensive works, but space precludes this on the present occasion. Instead, I shall briefly turn to early monolingual English dictionaries. These began as compilations to explain difficult or “hard” words, and their aim was thus quite different right from the start. In England, as in other European countries, the emancipation from the predominance of Latin during the Renaissance led to a discussion of how to expand the vocabulary of the mother tongue to equip it for all the linguistic functions necessary for a fully developed vernacular. The language was enriched by borrowing from other languages, by exploiting word-formation processes, by attempts at reviving words used in former times. Not unexpectedly, therefore, the first monolingual English dictionaries are smaller in size compared to the earlier bi- or multilingual ones, since they are all focussing on a particular section of the vocabulary, the hard words. Bullokar addresses the restriction of his English expositor in the “Instruction to the Reader”: “if a word bee of different significations, the one easie, the other more difficult, I onely speake of interpretation of the hardest” (Bullokar 1616, sig. A4v). What the first three monolingual English dictionaries have in common is intralingual synonymy and explicit marking of lexical items borrowed from other languages. They differ in method, amount, and consistency. The donor languages singled out are predominantly Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and French. Word currency is an important factor in Bullokar’s English expositor (1616) and Henry Cockeram’s English dictionarie (1623). Lexical items regarded as old—“now growne out of vse” (Bullokar 1616, sig. A4v)—are marked by an asterisk. Many of the difficult terms included in the dictionaries are assigned their subject field. This holds for Bullokar and Cockeram. Since the compilers concentrate on the difficult words, dictionary entries mostly record one sense. The internal structure of lexical items is only occasionally tackled. Examples from Bullokar’s English expositor are: Attribute. To giue to, or impute. It signifieth sometime a fit title or terme applyed to any thing. Capitall. Chiefe, principall; sometime deadly, abhominable.

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An example from Cockeram’s English dictionarie is “Audience, A hearing: sometime it signifieth an assembly of people” (Cockeram 1623, part 1). Henry Cockeram’s work is most unusual in its tripartite structure, which is explained as follows: The first Booke hath the choisest words themselues now in vse, wherewith our Language is inriched and become so copious, to which words the common sense is annexed. The second Booke containes the vulgar words, which whensoeuer any desirous of a more curious explanation by a more refined and elegant speech shall looke into, he shall there receiue the exact and ample word to expresse the same … The last Booke is a recitall of seuerall persons, Gods and Goddesses, Giants and Deuils, Monsters and Serpents, Birds and Beasts, Riuers, Fishes, Herbs, Stones, Trees, and the like. (Cockeram 1623, part 1, sig. A4v)

We here have a clear stylistic differentiation between the “choicest words” and “vulgar words.” It is in Cockeram’s second book that we note occasional pockets of small word-families and a policy of providing the reader with opposite expressions, basically adjectival antonyms, e.g. “not to be Corrected. Incorrigible. which may be Corrected. Corrigible.” For the indication of similarity in meaning, synonymy, and variation in derivatives we have to turn to the occasional cross-references provided in all three dictionaries, e.g. Bullokar’s “Brocke. See Badger” and “Canicular. See dogge-dayes,” and the pairs of words sometimes bracketed together with the same definition in Cockeram and Cawdrey, e.g. vastitude and vastity, defined jointly as “Greatnes, exceeding largenesse” (Cockeram 1623, part 1) and rurall and rusticall, defined jointly as “clownish, vplandish, or churlish, and vnmannerly” (Cawdrey 1604). For their collections of hard words the compilers also turned to the special subject fields of philosophy and logic. With the explication of terms of logic, sense relations, not previously focussed upon in the bilingual works, come to the fore. There is a conspicuous difference in the individual treatment and development. Cawdrey, for example, has no entry for disparates, and the entry for correlatives reads “correllatiues, when 2. things are so linked together, that the one cannot be without the otherr.” Bullokar meticulously specifies the subject field: Correlatiue. A tearme of Logicke applyed to such words as cannot bee spoken, but there must be supposed some other word, which is necessarily a dependant vpon it: as a Father and a Sonne; a Maister and a Seruant; a Captaine and a Souldiour; a Husband and a Wife.

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Chapter Three Disparates. A terme of Logicke, applyed to such wordes as are onely differing one from another, but not contrary: as heate and cold are contraries, but heate and moisture are Disparates: viz. two contrarie qualities.

Cockeram dispenses with the indication of the subject field: Correllatiues, Words which cannot be spoken, but there must be supposed some other word which is necessarily a dependant vpon it; as a father and a sonne, a captaine and a souldier, a husband and a wife, &c. Disparates, Words which are differing one from another, but not contrarie, as heat and cold are contraries, but heat and moisture disparates: viz. two contrarie qualities. (Cockeram 1623, part 1)

The fullest description of correlatives, exemplified with four excellent sets of English nouns, is given by Bullokar. In its explicitness it is also the earliest, and well deserves a full record in the third edition of the OED. To sum up, we see that both the bilingual and the monolingual English dictionaries of the period tackle lexicological issues. The former are especially rich in distinguishing lexico-grammatical relations, the internal and external sense relations between lexical items, and word-formation analyses and rules. The latter tackle fewer issues, but important ones, notably word origins, subject fields and word currency, and they take a step towards defining and exemplifying semantic terminology.

CHAPTER FOUR THE REAL RICHARD HOWLET R. W. MCCONCHIE 1. Howlet’s obscurity Sixteenth-century lexicographers, at least those with no other claim to fame such as being publishers like the Estiennes or Thomas Thomas, have in many cases remained frustratingly obscure as people. Richard Howlet, usually known as Huloet, was the author of Abcedarium anglico latinum (1552), an early English–Latin dictionary. This work, his only known publication, has been discussed from the lexicographical point of view in a recent paper by Gabriele Stein (2006), but I wish to concentrate here on his biography. Stein also discusses “the internal path” (2006, 25) to see if the dictionary itself might reveal anything about him. Much is considered, but less seems conclusive. Howlet was, on the evidence of the biographer and antiquarian John Bale, probably born in Wisbech—“de Wisbeche in Nordouolgia” (Bale c1550/1902, 352)—but practically nothing else is known of his life. Neither has the little written about him since always been useful. This article attempts to clear away at least a few of the confusions, and to outline some remaining problems concerning his life and work. His dictionary was published under the Latinized name Hulœtus, which has given rise to Huloet, the form of the surname which became established, for no very satisfactory reason, and has been most often used since (see McConchie 2000). However, the form which appears at the end of the work in the address to the English reader is “Richarde Howlet” (Howlet 1552, sig. Nn4r). There is also at least one instance of the English form being used in the sixteenth century: Peter Levins mentions the work of “Maister Howlet” in the dedication of his Manipulus vocabulorum (Levins 1570, sig. ¶4r). Howlet’s reviser, however, John Higgins, entitles his edition of the Abcedarium “Huloets dictionarie, newelye corrected, amended, set in order, and enlarged,” and his epistle to the reader begins “At first I toke this worke of Maister Huloets in hande” (Howlet 1572, title page and sig. ¶3r). He is mentioned as Howlet in at least one twentieth-century source (Mathews 1933, 12). The STC (Pollard and Redgrave 1976–1991) also gives a cross-reference to the English name while

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preferring to list him under the now-traditional latinized form. Since latinizations of English names are now disregarded on the whole, there seems to be every reason to consider Howlet as the appropriate form for the future, as I will do for the present purposes as well.

Fig. 4-1: Title page of the British Library copy of Howlet’s Abcedarium

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2. Howlet’s life Since Bale provides the nearest link to Howlet presently available, his evidence must be considered in more detail. Bale cites the printer and publisher John Day as his source of information as to Howlet’s birthplace, but no documentary proof of this claim is presently available, and there is no indisputable evidence that Bale had personal knowledge of Howlet. However, there is circumstantial evidence indicating that Bale’s claim must be taken seriously. Day’s connections are very similar to Bale’s, since he was born in Dunwich, near to Bale’s birthplace, Cove. Bale was always very conscious of his Suffolk origins (McCusker 1971, 1–2), and may have cultivated Day’s friendship for this reason. In any case, Day published some of Bale's works (e.g. STC items 1294, 1298, 22992), sometimes employing Steven Mierdman, for whom see section 3.3 below, as the printer. Day and Bale were both protestants, and were both therefore vulnerable after the succession of Mary I. Bale was certainly a Marian exile from 1553 (McCusker 1971, 237). Day has been identified as responsible for a number of surreptitiously published works hostile to the Marian regime which appeared in 1553–4 (Pettegree 2004; STC 3:52; Oastler 1975, 9–13). He was, indeed, imprisoned as a printer of illegal material at the time, as the diarist Henry Machyn records: The xvj day of October [1554] cam rydyng owt of Northfoke on John Day prynter and ys servand, and a prest, and an-odur prynter, for pryntyng of noythy bokes, to the Towre. (Machyn a1563/1848, 72).

Day was connected with Howlet as well as with Bale: the Abcedarium, while identified on its title page as having been printed “ex officina Gulielmi Riddel,” bears one of Day’s devices (McKerrow 1949, no. 83) with the motto “Arise, for it is day.” All this suggests that Bale’s knowledge of Howlet’s origins may well be reliable. He is likely to have obtained it very shortly after the appearance of the Abcedarium, whose printing appears to have been completed in September 1552 (the date of the colophon: Howlet 1552, sig. Nn4v), just before his formal nomination in October to the position of Bishop of Ossory. After his departure to take up his bishopric, Bale can, as James Carley and Caroline Brett point out, “have had little opportunity to add substantially to the listings” in his Index Britanniae scriptorum (Carley and Brett 1990, xiv–xv). Another consideration is that Bale ascribes Wisbech to Norfolk, not Cambridgeshire, which raises the question of changes in the county boundaries. Perhaps Howlet lived in one of the outlying parishes east of Wisbech, Outwell and Upwell, which belonged to Norfolk at some time. I have found nothing to suggest that Wisbech itself was ever under the jurisdiction of Norwich. Stein’s

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comment that he knows about flint walls in “Norwyche buildynges and in those partyes” (Stein 2006, 25 citing Howlet 1552 s.v. walle) need not be all surprising if he was indeed an East Anglian, since such buildings are to be found almost everywhere in those counties. Whether it suggests that he had a connection with Norwich is rather doubtful, since such a comment might be made by someone from elsewhere who found such buildings interesting, while a local might overlook such an obvious fact. Practically no details of Howlet’s life are known, even his dates of birth and death being entirely lacking. Wisbech itself is covered by the parish of Wisbech St. Peter, while Wisbech St. Mary and Leverington are nearby. Parish registers for these and other nearby parishes, however, provide little help. Howlets obviously lived in Leverington towards the end of the sixteenth century, but proof of Richard’s existence there remains elusive. The earliest parish record is the burial of Sara on 24. 7. 1603, the daughter of Edward, publican, and Elizabeth, of Newton-in-the-Isle. A Richard Howlet, son of Edward and Elizabeth, was christened on 23. 2. 1605/6 in that parish,1 and a Grace Howlet, daughter of Edward, in Leverington on 1. 5. 1614. Edward, son of Richard, was christened in Leverington on 23. 4. 1633, apparently the first of Richard’s six children.2 Another Howlet (unnamed, but possibly a sibling of Grace) was born in Leverington in July 1615. The name was, however, common enough throughout Cambridgeshire, and families may be located in a number of parishes. The Ely consistory court wills show that a family called Howlet/Howlott/Houlet was established in Wisbech (Leverington) by the midfifteenth century.3 Perhaps the most promising clue from the parish registers is the fact that the names of the eldest sons of the Leverington Howlets seem to have alternated between Edward and Richard, but the earliest recorded is an Edward who died in 1618. There is no record of Howlet having received a university education, though this does seem very likely. Bale describes him as “in bonis literis fœliciter 1

The Richard who was buried on 1. 3. 1612 in the same parish may be his grandfather, but it also possible that it is in fact the child born in 1605 and that there is no immediate connexion between these Richards. It seems quite possible however that Edward and Elizabeth moved from Newton-in-the-Isle to Leverington between the death of Edward’s father and the birth of Grace, and that Richard lived to marry Catherine Coward in 1633. A further speculation is that the Richard who died in 1612 was the grandson of the lexicographer. 2 A Leonard was born to this Richard on 31. 8. 1637, and one of the very few early mentions of Howlets in the Cambridge University records is a Leonard Howlut who graduated in 1558 (Grace Book ǻ), but this is drawing a very long bow indeed, given the number of parishes in which Howlets appear. 3 Catherine Howlet, Wisbech, wife of William 1457 (ref. V. C. 1.18); Thomas Howlott, Wisbech 1455 (ref. V. C. 1.40); William Howlet, Wisbech 1465 (ref. V. C. 2.107).

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educatus” (Bale 1557, 753). It also seems possible that Howlet was taught by the first master of St. Paul's school in London, William Lilly, since he calls him “preceptor meus” in the text of the dictionary (sig. Aa1v). The records of the school unfortunately do not mention Howlet, so that this must remain a speculation. The Abcedarium is dedicated to the then Lord Chancellor, Thomas Goodrich, Bishop of Ely, and is dated from London.

3. The Abcedarium The Abcedarium is an English–Latin dictionary intended for teaching, in the tradition of works such as the Promptorium parvulorum, sive clericum of c.1440, the Catholicum anglicum, or the Alvearie of John Baret, published in 1574. This suggests that Howlet may have been a teacher, as do occasional entries in the dictionary, for instance admonitions such as “it were very necessary to lerne the diuers significacions of scribo wyth his compoundes” (Howlet 1552, sig. Mm5r).4 Grammatical notes are added here and there, as well as instructions as to the use of some prefixes and suffixes. Quotations are translated, and proper names and explanations of the letters of the alphabet are included (Stein 1985, 182–3). Latin synonyms of the English headwords are copiously provided. The headwords themselves are often entire phrases or even lengthy comments, suggesting that the dictionary was compiled by the then familiar method of inverting the entries of Latin–English dictionaries (Stein 1985, 184–6). The Abcedarium was the first new dictionary published for classroom use in the sixteenth century, its compilation perhaps prompted by the sustained popularity of the Promptorium parvulorum early in the century (Wheatley 1882, vii), but it was immediately superseded by John Withals’s successful Shorte dictionarie for yonge begynners, published in 1553. Perhaps it is for this reason that it appears to be an uncommon book, only fourteen copies being listed in the standard catalogues.5 One must wonder why Howlet and his publisher decided to print the work in folio, since this would have put it beyond the purchase of many students. Howlet expressed the wish in his “peroration to the Englyshe reader” that better scholars than himself might follow the pattern 4

Stein draws attention to his mention of Littleton’s Tenures as indicating some interest in the law, and to “a pronounced interest in mathematics” (2006, 26). 5 In the UK at Aberdeen; Trinity and King’s Colleges, Cambridge; the British Library; University College London; the Bodleian; and the John Rylands Library; and in the North America at the University of British Columbia; Harvard; the Newberry; the Folger; the University of Illinois (two copies); and the University of Michigan. The annotations mentioned in the catalogue record for the Folger copy comprise the usual pen trials, signatures, and occasional jottings.

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he has set and produce “suche a perfecte worke wherwith all Englysh hartes would be contented” (Howlet 1552, sig. N4r), and the wishes of the readers, if popularity is a measure, were almost immediately met in fact by the appearance of Withals’s dictionary, a book which must have been more convenient, both in size and cost. The only later edition of the Abcedarium, greatly altered by John Higgins and published in 1572, was dedicated by the editor to the merchant Sir George Peckham (Howlet 1572, sigs. *2r–v). The Folger copy of this edition was identified by a modern owner as having been annotated by Higgins in preparation for a further edition (English Short Title Catalogue 2006, record no. ESTCS119246; Alston 1966a, 190). A modern edition has never appeared, despite the good intentions of the Early English Text Society (Wheatley 1882, vii), but a facsimile of the first edition is available (Howlet 1552/1970).

3.1. The annotated Illinois copy of the Abcedarium One of the two copies of the dictionary at the University of Illinois, henceforth Illinois 1, is heavily and interestingly annotated. There seems to be a certain amount of misleading information about it. It was purchased from the well-known Rosenbach auction house on July 11, 1952, and was described in the catalogue as “First edition, and the author’s own copy.” Alston, without giving the source of his information, calls it “Richard Huloet’s own copy of his Abcedarium with numerous notes and additions (including Old English equivalents) by Laurence Nowell and William Lambard” (Alston 1966a, 190; cf. his introductory note to Howlet 1552/1970). However, there is no obvious evidence to support either part of this claim.

Fig. 4.2: Laurence Nowell’s signature on the Illinois 1 copy

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Fig. 4. 3: William Lambarde’s signature on the Illinois 1 copy The copy itself has two autographs; first, the undated signature of Nowell (the date 1565 inserted below Nowell’s signature may be in his hand, and if so, this may be the year in which he acquired the book) and, second, that of William Lambarde, dated 1570. James Rosier and N. P. Ker correctly consider the annotations to be largely Nowell’s, but Rosier’s article on this copy makes no particular claim about any other hand, merely commenting that “Lambarde’s hand and probably Huloet’s as well, do appear, but rarely, and sporadically” (Rosier 1977, 189). Rosier does not mention the Lambarde signature specifically or suggest which hand he thinks might be Howlet’s. In any case, no autograph by Howlet is to be found, although there is a pen trial on sig. B2v which may be his.6 Perhaps Rosier simply took the auction house's word for it. The annotations themselves take two forms. First there are marginal notes in Nowell’s angular cursive hand, along with glosses in Old English in a clear upright hand, presumably intended for an Old English dictionary of some kind. The different appearance of these hands does not necessarily mean that Nowell was not the writer, since the Anglo-Saxonists of that period were inclined to employ a different-looking hand for their Old English.7 Second, there are interleaved pages at the end of letters and in some cases the end of sections of letters which contain lists of place-names with transcriptions of documentary sources. Since these are orderly and hardly contain any corrections, Nowell must have prepared these lists in advance of copying them into the dictionary. There are also at least two Latin quotations which appear to be in another hand, possibly Lambarde’s, but it is difficult to be sure. They are unlikely to be Howlet’s since they appear on the interleaved pages, which I assume for now were inserted by Nowell.

6

The first word appears to be “Richard.” The second may be “Rob(h?)erd,” but the third letter is smudged. A third pen trial nearby is badly smudged and unfinished. 7 My thanks to Professor Eric Stanley for pointing this out to me.

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3.2 The Rosenbach records8 Rosenbach’s sold this copy to Illinois along with another of the same work (Illinois 2, a clean copy with no annotations).9 The date of sale was actually January 23, 1952, the date supplied by the Library, July 11, probably being the date on which the Library actually paid for its purchase. The Rosenbach company archives have two stock cards for this item, as well as the so-called “collation” file on which the company recorded background information about lots. In this case the two fail to agree on important points. The first, typewritten stock-file card ascribes the annotations (incorrectly) to Lambarde, and makes no mention of Howlet’s autograph or hand. The second stock-card has been clipped from the company catalogue Rare books manuscripts and autograph letters (1947). This uses only a small part of the data from the typed stock file, adds some more, and makes the possibly inaccurate ascription to Howlet, which is unjustified by what appears in the original stock-file. The company archives provide no basis for either attribution of the annotations in the work. It seems then that Alston either had access to the possibly misleading printed catalogue, perhaps in a copy held by the library itself, and not the original stock-file, or got the information from the library’s own account based on the catalogue. This information passed into Rosier’s article, presumably unchecked.

3.3 The printing of the Abcedarium To return to the dictionary and its author, Rosier notes that Howlet had intended a new edition (Rosier 1977, 189–90). His authority is Howlet’s prefatory epistle to his most Latinate and most learned readers, “latiniss[imos] et doctiss[imos] viros,” where he promises that he had been forced to abandon the correction of errors in the present edition, and that its consequent shortcomings will be patched up (Howlet 1552, sig. ʌ3r).10 He associates this with the printer’s circumstances: his scarcity of resources, and not carelessness, “inopiam, & non incuriam,” are to blame. Howlet likewise writes in his English

8

I am extremely grateful to Elizabeth E. Fuller, the Librarian of the Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia, for the information in this section of the paper. I am leaving the second, unannotated copy out of this account. 9 Rosenbach’s acquired this copy on July 1, 1925, according to their records, which simply state “London” as the source. Ms. Fuller points out that this is “unusual” (pers. comm.). The other copy is presumably that sold by Sotheby’s to the agents Ellis in the sale beginning on April 28, 1930. 10 “Nempe inter castigandum tanta tumultuabantur, nec otium supererat, ut pro tempore castigationem deserui. Obtestor ut hoc delictum diligentiae meae temporariae resarciendum reddatur.”

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“Peroration” that he is not entirely happy with the work, and that its typographical errors will be corrected: I do hartely desyre for the prynter, that thou ne wylt be offended with thys his impression the whiche albeit at thys tyme be ful of faultes … yet be thou in an assured expectacyon that the nexte shalbe amended and better trymmed to thy contentacion. (Howlet 1552, sig. N4r),

Their correction would almost certainly mean resetting, a “nexte” impression, whether the content were to be altered or not: no printer of the hand-press period could afford to keep the type for a book as large as the Abcedarium standing for long (Gaskell 1985, 116–7). Authors regularly complained about the incompetence of printers, and looked forward to more accurate second editions of their work, but Howlet’s eagerness to excuse the printer is unusual. Indeed, he adds a little more in this vein, saying that the Abcedarium is not only “ful of faultes” but also “not of suche good letter as the sayde Prynter woulde haue hadde (yf oportunitie hadde serued).” This claim that the printer did not have access to as satisfactory a set of types as might have been hoped for is an even more unusual point: none, for instance, of the sixty-eight notes on the printing of Latin books in early modern England gathered by James Binns mentions such a want (Binns 1990, 399–435, indexed at 432–3). Who was this printer, and what was his problem? The title page of the Abcedarium suggests a number of conflicting answers. As was noted above, it bears a device associated with John Day as part of its fine title-border. Like many other such decorative borders, and indeed decorative elements throughout many a sixteenth-century book, there is no need to assume that this one identifies a printer firmly, or that it only appeared in a single publication: such plates were borrowed and lent freely. This title border in fact first appeared on the title page of the Taverner–Tyndale–Rogers Bible published by Day in 1551 (STC item 2088), and was subsequently used a number of times, surviving down into the seventeenth century (McKerrow and Ferguson 1932, no. 76). The device, and the initial use of the border on a publication of Day’s, both suggest that the border began its life in the early 1550s as Day’s own. So, if Day himself did not print the Abcedarium, the printer was commissioned by him. There was no reason for him to print the Abcedarium anonymously, and he was certainly commissioning other people to print for him in the closing years of the reign of Edward VI: indeed, the 1551 Bible, though identified on its title page as “Imprinted ... By Ihon Day dwellyng ouer Aldersgate,” was the work of three different printing houses (Oastler 1975, 7). So the fact that the Abcedarium bore Day’s title-border but not his imprint suggests that he was its publisher but not its printer, though he made materials of his own available to the printer. Bale’s note after his information about Howlet and the Abcedarium is “ex officina Ioannis Daye,” meaning not that Day printed the book but that it was in his

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shop: ex officina could have either of these senses, so that for instance Bale notes “Ex officina Ioannis Daye” after both his entry for Antony Gilby’s commentary on Micah, which is identified in its colophon as having been printed by Day, and also his entry for William Baldwin’s Tretise of morall phylosophy, which Day certainly did not print (Bale c1550/1902, 352; 33; 115). STC comments that “Items by or attributed to Day’s press before 1559 and his relationship to other printers and publishers during this period, particularly Steven Mierdman, still require further study” (STC 3:51). However, it identifies the printer of the Abcedarium without further caveat as Mierdman. This problematic figure was a Dutch religious exile who had worked for Day from the late 1540s onwards (Heijting 2004; STC 3:119), apparently printing works such as Bale’s Apology of Iohan Bale agaynste a ranke papyst and Expostulation or complaynte agaynste the blasphemyes of a franticke papyst of Hamshyre for him (STC items 1275, 1294). The grounds on which the editors of STC ascribe the printing of the Abcedarium to him are not clear, and no other long text in Latin has been ascribed to him. A different printer is identified on the title-page of the Abcedarium, which reads “ex officina Gulielmi Riddel.” The colophon likewise begins “Londini ex officina Gulielmi Riddel.” STC describes William Riddell as a bookseller rather than a printer (3:145), and this might by itself suggest that “ex officina” here indicates that Riddell was the bookseller rather than the printer. But the form of words of the colophon is, more fully, “ex officina Gulielmi Riddel, Typographi iurati,” where “typographus iuratus” must surely be taken as a statement that Riddel was a printer. It is not a normal phrase in English imprints, though it occurs now and again in imprints of books from Continental Europe, especially the Low Countries.11 The question then is whether the claim that Riddel was the printer of the Abcedarium can be taken at face value. If it can, it was his only significant publication, and was very different from his others: a couple of single-sheet ballads and an octavo of sixty-four pages are the only other works to name him in their imprints. No wonder, then, that he did not have the types he needed to do his work to Howlet’s satisfaction. If it cannot, then the work was, for whatever reason, published under a misleading false imprint. It may seem somewhat puzzling that Day would arrange for this to be done, and would entrust the printer with a relatively considerable work and a fine title-border, but not with a better set of types. 11

E. g. Luis de Carvajal, Theologicarum sententiarum liber unus (Antwerp: imprimebat Ioannes Grauius typographus iuratus, 1548); Nikolaus Mameranus, Carmen ad omnes christianum principes et urbium magistratus (Brussels: excudebat Michael Hamontanus, sculptor & typographus iuratus, 1564); James Cheyne, De geographia libri duo (Douai: ex typographia Lodouici de Winde, typographi iurati, 1576).

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4. Richard Howlett’s funeral? In the meantime, I must write a very frustrating footnote to this account. Henry Machyn, the diarist and supplier for undertakers, went to the funeral of a Richard Howlett, who died in 1560. Machyn’s diary reads: The xx day of September was bered in (Kent) master Recherd Howllett of Sydnam sqwyre, in the parryche of Lussam [Lewisham], with a pennon of armes and a cott armur and a ij dosen of skochyons of armes and a [half dozen] of [buckram,] and master West dyd pryche, and after to Sydman to dener, the wyche was a fyse dener and the godlest dener that has bene in Kent for all kyndes of fysse [both] fresse and salt. (Machyn a1563/1848, 243)

This Richard Howlet was, then, a member of an armigerous family living in Sydenham in Kent.12 His wife, Anne, mentioned in his will, was probably the Anne buried in Deptford in the 1570s. There is no reason, apart from the evidence of Bale, not to wonder whether this is not the dictionary Howlet.

5. Conclusion This study has produced very little that had not been known already and a few questions about which to speculate. If, however, I have been able to clarify some matters and establish a basis on which more productive research can be based, then that is enough for now. Although it is highly unlikely that the real Richard Howlet will now stand up, at least we may get some inkling of where he has been sitting.

12 A Richard Howlett of Sydenham, presumably a forebear, was granted arms some time before. College of Arms MS L9 28b, 2 (c.1510). See Woodcock et al. 1996, 249. My thanks to Adrian James of the College of Arms in London for this information (pers. comm.).

CHAPTER FIVE “CERTAINE THINGS TO BE CONSIDERED & CORRECTED IN WILL. DUGDALES SAXON-LEXICON” PAOLA TORNAGHI

There be some, who slight and despise this sort of Learning, and represent it to be a dry barren Monkish studie. ... But I dare assure any wise and sober Man, that Historical Antiquities, especially a search into the notices of our own Nation, do deserve and will reward the pains of any English student. (Kennett 1695, sig. b4v)

1. William Dugdale Three productive friendships led William Dugdale (1605–1686) to the study of antiquities. Thanks to the encouragement of William Burton, author of a description of Leicestershire, and another antiquarian, Sir Simon Archer, Dugdale began to collect material for a history of Warwickshire. Dugdale’s life suddenly changed when Sir Simon and Lady Archer accompanied him to London in 1638, where he was introduced to Sir Henry Spelman. There Dugdale came to hear of Roger Dodsworth, who had been searching and collecting records for antiquities of Yorkshire for some years. Since Dodsworth was elderly, Spelman suggested that Dugdale join in his research in order to get the project completed. Dugdale met Dodsworth and this union brought about the Monasticon [Anglicanum]. The third friendship was that of Sir Christopher Hatton (subsequently the first Baron Hatton), who was then staying near Temple Bar in London. Hatton welcomed Dugdale “wth all expressions of kindness, wth readiness to further him in these his Studyes” (Hamper 1827, 11). Hatton became in fact his first patron. Thanks to Spelman’s and Hatton’s recommendations to Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel and Earl Marshal of England, Dugdale was appointed herald, with the title of blanch lyon pursuivant. His career would reach its peak after the Restoration when he was named Garter King of Arms and was knighted. He

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never abandoned his studies, however. In a typical letter, dated 27 February 1639—just after his appointment to the pursuivancy, when heraldry might have been expected to absorb his attention—he wrote to Sir Simonds D’Ewes as follows: I am glad to heare of yor inclinacion to print the Saxon Dictionarye, and especially the English therewth, inasmuch as it hath so much consonancye to the Saxon…..I thank you much for yor great love and respects to, and in particular for yt peece of Saxon wch I hope to receive from you. Sr Henr. Spelman hath given me a Saxon salter, and I purpose…to bestow some tyme in that study hopinge to obteine some small portion of knowledge therin. (Hamper 1827, 195– 196)

Dugdale accompanied Charles I to Oxford in October 1642, when it became the royalist headquarters, and in the following month he received from the university the degree of MA. It was during this stay in an Oxford which had become tumultuous that he compiled his dictionary of Old English, of which the holograph manuscript survives in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, as MS Dugdale 29. This is a paper manuscript of 39.1 × 24.6 cm, comprising iv + 332 leaves. It is dedicated to Hatton and dated 1644. Dugdale did not give it a title; in 1705 Humfrey Wanley called it Dictionarium saxonico–anglicum, perhaps influenced by the title of William Somner’s Dictionarium saxonico–latino–anglicum of 1659 (Yerkes 1976, 110–112). The year 1644 did not mark the end of the work on Dugdale’s dictionary. The antiquarian himself lived until 1686, though it is unlikely that he added any more entries to his dictionary, especially since Somner’s dictionary was published in 1659. What probably happened was that he added references and marginal notes, evidently using more manuscripts than the six of Hatton’s he had declared and the others cited in marginal notes. As a matter of fact, twothirds of the references in marginal quotations are to printed books (Hetherington 1980, 95).

2. The sources of Dugdale’s dictionary The compilation of MS Dugdale 29 was the result of a patient and long collection of historical, legal, religious, and scientific material drawn from many manuscripts and some other contemporary works. As a herald, Dugdale may have been the first seventeenth-century English scholar to use many of the old Anglo-Saxon charters, wills, and records of property transactions. As a lexicographer, Dugdale wanted to be both meticulous and rigorous and needed to check everything that had been gathered by his predecessors. That is why he entreated his assistants to be respectful of sources:

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The catalogue of the Bodleian Library offers some information about the material on which the dictionary is founded, describing MS Dugdale 29 as An Old English dictionary compiled by Dugdale from the following manuscripts in the possession of Sir Christopher Hatton: “Liber Quatuor homiliarum Sax’” ...; Liber quasdam constitutiones in concilio apud Wintoniam tempore regis Willelmi conquestoris edita, lingua Saxonica, necnon homilias quasdam Saxonicas continens ...; Liber Sax’ Dialogorum Gregorii cum herbale quodam Sax’ annexa ...; Liber curae pastoralis, a sancto Gregorio papa editus, et in Saxonicum sermonem translatus per regem Alfredum ...” and from the following printed books: Lambarde, De priscis Anglorum legibus (London 1568, 4°), The Gospells in Saxon and English (London 1571), Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent (London 1576), A Testimonie of Antiquitie, by William Lisle (London 1623), Spelman’s Concilia, vol. i. (London 1639), Psalterium Davidis Latino–Saxonicum Vetus (London 1640), and Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum venerabilis Bedae, Latino–Saxonica, ed. Wheelocke (London 1643). (Bodleian Library 1937, item 6519).

This is drawn straight from the list of sources on fo. ivv of MS Dugdale 29 (for which see Tornaghi 1999, 141–165). All of the manuscripts listed there are now in the Bodleian library. As is to be expected, it is not possible to state exactly how these sources were used. As a rule, Dugdale does not cite his sources next to the entry-words he records; there are occasional citations in marginal notes, linked to the entry by asterisks and some bibliographical references about the author, the title of the work and often the number of the page, containing the reference. Sue Hetherington (1975, 84) points out that the first clue that leads to the earlier seventeenth-century dictionaries is the very absence of citations….Dugdale names none in his entries although occasionally he does direct the reader by asterisks to some source names written in the outer margins of his folio.

3. The structure of Dugdale’s dictionary Folios 1r–31v and 34r–328v are ruled for three columns on each side and the entries are printed in a small, very neat hand. As a heading each column has a sequence of three letters (e.g. ABA, ABE etc; TAB, TAC, TAD etc.), which are usually the same as the initial letters of the entries below them. Columns are

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regularly separated by a vertical line whereas headings are usually written between two horizontal lines. The number of entries changes from column to column; some are crammed with entries, while others are almost empty, with many spaces between each single entry and others with none at all. It is likely that at first Dugdale underestimated the space needed for some combinations and provided for others he was not able to find. Entries are ordered approximately because Dugdale disregards alphabetical order in favour of an etymological order according to which all cognates are arranged and grouped. Brackets are also used to connect sequences of words that have the same base, yet arranged to some extent by part of speech; usually nouns are not bracketed with verb forms, but adjectives and adverbs may be so grouped. So, mana, manega, manegum, manige, manigra, and maniga are bracketed together with the equivalent “many,” and neolnys, neowelnysse, neowelnyssa, and neowenyssum are bracketed with the equivalent “deepenesse.” Such a lexicographic layout forces Dugdale to repeat many entries in order to record spelling variants and/or further specifications in defining entries. This feature is a proof of Dugdale’s meticulous care in transcribing and recording variant forms of the same word from different manuscripts. The treatment of variants in Dugdale’s Dictionarium is definitely “more consistent and more striking” than in John Joscelyn’s Dictionarium Saxonico–Latinum (BL MSS Cotton Titus A xv and xvi, c1565–75) where variants are only occasionally grouped in single entries (Hetherington 1980, 93). The fact that Dugdale recognises variants and gives them so much emphasis represents his major contribution to Old English lexicography. In this respect Dugdale’s work marks an important advance in lexicographic techniques. Yet in spite of his pains, Dugdale himself was not a consistently accurate transcriber and his work contains some errors, as do all of the early attempts in compiling dictionaries. Dugdale’s dictionary differs from dictionaries compiled in the same period, in particular from Sir Simonds D’Ewes’s (BL MSS Harley 8 and 9) and William Somner’s (1659), and from some previous works such as Joscelyn’s Dictionarium saxonico–latinum, because it does not usually use Latin as a defining language. That accounts for the title which Wanley gave to the dictionary: Dictionarium saxonico–anglicum. Looking at the entry pattern, this dictionary should be rather classified as a glossary. It supplies Old English words and modern English equivalents; a Latin definition is rarely provided and additional material is not frequent (Hetherington 1980, 92–93). It is interesting to underline that Dugdale did not mention his own dictionary in his diary (Hamper 1827, 45–148), probably because he did not regard it as worthy of notice, believing it to be inferior to the previously compiled dictionaries and those which were in progress, particularly

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D’Ewes’s and Somner’s dictionaries. From a letter written by Roger Dodsworth to Dugdale in 1650, it is also apparent that D’Ewes had a low opinion of the dictionary: I know no more of the Saxon Grammar then what the beast1 averreth, and beleive hee will not ly, viz. that itt is ready. My cosen Rushworth [John Rushworth the historian] hath taken his Saxon Testament [the glossed gospel-book now known as the MacRegol Gospels, Bodleian MS Auct. D. 2. 19] from him and doth much distasten his prittle prattle; hee hath a desire to procure some helps to perfect your Saxon Dictionary which the Beast undervalued to my Cosen (when [we] were with him and saw it in his study window) in regard what Hee had done to that purpose which is finished by Mr. Sumners hand, and would have you put out the Dictionary by such helpes. (Hamper 1827, 226)

In all likelihood, the dictionary was to be an outline of a wider and more articulated project which Dugdale was unable to achieve; this would account for the many repeated entries which would exclude any coherent selection by Dugdale himself.

4. The list of errata in MS Dugdale 29 The series of entries for the letter B stops at the end of the third column of fo. 31v with the entry-word berþonarius “a Bayliffe or he that lokes to the husbandrye,” beginning again at the first column of fo. 36r col. 1, with the entry besargaþ “condoleth, sorroweth for.” The intervening fos. 32 and 33 are smaller and have a different watermark.2 These folios are written on each side, arranged in two columns, and contain a list of 247 additions and corrections in alphabetical order under the heading “Certaine things to be considered & corrected in Will. Dugdales Saxon-Lexicon.”3 A list of representative corrections is given in the table presented as Appendix I below. These can be related to spelling mistakes in recording Old English words, semantic mistakes in translating into Modern English, or other inaccuracies. In some cases 1

I.e. D’Ewes, to whom Dodsworth, who disliked him personally and found his politics unacceptable, applies the same epithet in a letter to Dugdale dated November 14, 1649. 2 The watermark of the dictionary is a crest of France and Navarre including the letters AL, and marked by a scroll with the letters GB, whereas the watermarks of these folios are a unicorn and a bunch of grapes. Information kindly supplied by Dr B. BarkerBenfield of the Department of Western Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, who tells me that he has not located these watermarks in Heawood 1950. 3 After this paper went to press, Prof. John Considine drew Giese 1992 to my attention; I had not seen this article when working on MS Dugdale 29, and my conclusions are therefore independent from those which are drawn there.

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translations are given for the entries that are recorded in the dictionary without being translated into Modern English. The correcting hand not only emends errors but often tends to explain his emendations. The preposition for, sometimes shortened to f. or ff., is often used to point out a real replacement of the whole entry or part of it; the adverb rather is used to explain the definition and to show when there is uncertainty about the suggested correction; the Latin adverb forte is also used to express uncertainty. There is another Latin form which often occurs: it is quaere, added to those entries which the corrector has been unable to check—whether in other dictionaries or in different sources—so that he is in doubt as to whether the form is correct. Some of the corrected entries are complemented by specific references to sources, among which are the Laws of Cnut, Alfred, and Ine, and Spelman’s Concilia. At the end of this list the anonymous compiler provides some enlightening information: “Some other words there are, against which (as unsatisfied) I have sett a q. as further to be considered of” (fo.33v col. 2). The small letter q stands for Latin quaere, which often occurs in this list of corrections. It also occurs throughout the whole dictionary before those entries which need to be revised and corrected. Yet the errata list does not record all the entries marked by this letter q in the dictionary, and conversely, some corrections in the list are recorded for entries which are not marked in the dictionary. The disparities are recorded in the table presented as Appendix 2 below. Just considering the data for the letters M and S, we notice that of the 1016 entries for words beginning M, there are twelve entries in the errata, but only nine of these are marked for further consideration with a q in the dictionary itself, while seven further entries are marked with a q in the dictionary but are not in the errata. Likewise, of the 2779 entries for words beginning S, there are thirty-nine entries in the errata, but only twenty-four of these are marked for further consideration with a q in the dictionary itself, while ten further entries are marked with a q in the dictionary but are not in the errata. The anonymous hand concludes this list by writing that he has “to divers others added an interpretation, where wanting, such (for the most part) as I found in Sr S. Dewes booke” (fo. 33v col. 2). The writer must therefore have used “Dewes booke” at Sir Simonds D’Ewes’s home before April 1650, when D’Ewes died, or have had access to it later, after his death. It is not apparent from any correspondence that D’Ewes had lent his dictionary to anyone. The handwriting occurring in these folios and in some additions throughout the dictionary is the so-called secretary hand, a cursive hand marked by rounded strokes, which developed in Britain in the first half of the sixteenth century and spread until the half of the seventeenth century (Hector 1958, 57–60). This handwriting owes its name to its specific use; thanks to its smoothness, the secretary hand was suited to practical and ordinary purposes and to the needs of

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an environment where trade and interpersonal relations were ever on the increase after the discovery of the New World. It was used both for private and official correspondence. A painstaking comparison with the manuscript of D’Ewes’s dictionary, the Dictionarium citeriorum saeculorum anglo–saxonicum latinum (BL MSS Harley 8 and 9) has revealed that the same hand responsible for compiling the errata and some additions in the manuscript of Dugdale’s dictionary is also responsible for writing a high number of entries in D’Ewes’s dictionary, entries that are drawn directly from Dugdale’s. A further comparison of the hand on folios 32r–33v of MS Dugdale 29 and the hand of a letter written by Somner to D’Ewes in 1650, a few days before D’Ewes’s death (BL MS Harley 374, Art. 175), shows that this hand in Dugdale’s dictionary is indeed Somner’s. Several clues lead in fact to William Somner. A letter from Dugdale to D’Ewes, written in January 1649, gives evidence of William Somner’s assistance to D’Ewes. Dugdale writes: I hope now yt you have ye advantage of yt honest man, Mr Somner, his helpe, you will speede ye impression of your Saxon Lexicon…I pray you thinke well thereof, and neglect not this opportunity of Mr Sumners’s helpe. (Hamper 1827, 222)

The letter from Dodsworth to Dugdale quoted above which reports Rushworth’s wish that Dugdale “would have you put out the Dictionary by such helpes” as Somner’s shows that Dugdale knew of Somner’s abilities and was aware that they might be directed towards the improvement of his own dictionary. The same letter shows that Dugdale had lent his dictionary to D’Ewes at a time when Somner was working for D’Ewes: Dodsworth and Rushworth “saw it in his study window.” It remained in D’Ewes’s keeping until his death on April 18, 1650: witness another (fragmentary) letter from Dodsworth to Dugdale, dated the following day: our freind of Westminster [D’Ewes] is dead …, my cosen [Rushworth…wisheth your] Saxon Dictionary gotten out [of D’Ewes’s library] and I wishe you had your other books. (Hamper 1827, 229)

5. Comparing the dictionaries of Dugdale, D’Ewes, and Somner A comparison can be made between some of the entries recorded in the errata of MS Dugdale 29 and the corresponding ones in the main text of MS Dugdale 29, D’Ewes’s dictionary in MSS Harley 8–9, and Somner 1659 in

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order to show how the study of Anglo-Saxon was carried out and to demonstrate the peculiar continuum of Old English lexicography. Its results are presented in the table at Appendix 3 below; some examples can be given here.

5.1 Somner emends Dugdale from D’Ewes Dugdale’s entry for the verb secgan (or as he has it, secgean) glosses the word “yield, pay,” and is marked with a q (MS Dugdale 29, fo. 250r col. 2). Somner noted the correct equivalent in the errata list: “it rather signifies to say or speak,” adding that the word meaning “to pay” is sellan. He appears to have taken this from D’Ewes’s dictionary, where the entry is “secgan Dicere”: he regularly translated D’Ewes’s Latin for additions to Dugdale’s dictionary, since its defining language was English. In his own (Somner 1659), he used both languages, his explanation of secgan being “Dicere loqui, referre, to say, to speak, to rehearse, to report, to tell.” Sometimes, however, the equivalents which appear both in Somner 1659 and in MSS Harley 8–9 are not actually borrowed by Somner from D’Ewes himself. The gloss on smiþ-cræft in MS Harley 9 is “Ars fabrilis, the art or trade of a smith,” but this is written in Somner’s hand, so when he reused it in Somner 1659 s.v. smiþ-cræft “Ars fabrilis, the Smiths craft,” he was reusing his own material. As well as consulting D’Ewes for meanings, Somner took some forms from him: so, for instance, he marked Dugdale’s entry rerenesse “cruelty” with a q, and then noted the form reðenesse in the errata, drawing apparently on D’Ewes’s entry reðnesse “Severitas, terror, crudelitas.” (The error in this case was doubtless from confusion of the long-stemmed Anglo-Saxon r with the character þ, which is equivalent to ð.) Sometimes, though, he emends forms independently of D’Ewes: Dugdale’s regeorde “speech, language” is marked with a q in the text and corrected to gereorde in the errata, but this is not from D’Ewes, whose dictionary has regeorde “Sermo. Speech. Language.” Somner 1659 follows the errata in MS Dugdale 29: gereord “Lingua, sermo a language, tongue or speech.” Somner 1659 departs from D’Ewes and Dugdale in his treatment of inflected forms, which he does not enter as headwords: where D’Ewes has staþelodest “Fundasti, hast founded or established” (in Somner’s hand, as it happens) and MS Dugdale 29 has both staþelodest and a variant staðylodest (discussed by Somner in the errata), Somner 1659 registers only the infinitive staþelian. His indebtedness to D’Ewes is therefore wide-ranging but far from slavish. Only once does Somner actually acknowledge D’Ewes’s work explicitly, in the entry suarmodnesse: “suarmodnesse ffor Slowenesse. Starknesse. ffor Id. swarmodes in Sr Simonds Dewes booke.”

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5.2 Somner emends D’Ewes from Dugdale A number of entries are marked with a dot in the main text of MS Dugdale 29 and emended in the hand identified with Somner’s in the errata; nearly all of these also appear in MSS Harley 8–9 as additions in Somner’s hand. Our suggestion is that Somner exploited Dugdale’s dictionary as a source first for his contributions to MSS Harley 8–9 and later for his own printed dictionary, and that the dots were his sign for entries to be copied from MS Dugdale 29. For example, Dugdale decided to make an entry for lupinus montanus with the definition stub “ye herbe called ...,” and this entry is marked with a dot. Somner emended it in the errata with the note “Lupinus montanus ffor Mountaine pulse.” The entry for lupinus montanus in D’Ewes’s dictionary is in his hand. There, he first translated Dugdale’s stub as “herba sic dicta,” i.e. “a herb so called,” but then added “forte Mountaine pulse”; the Latin adverbial forms forte and fortasse “perhaps” are often used by Somner to express doubts about defining or translating some words. Another example is olisatrum, and other plant names such as liþ wyrt and mar-beamas also caught Somner’s eye. The word unmæne, which can mean “free, exempt” or “unperjured,” is glossed “Free” in MS Dugdale 29 and “Immunes. Free” in MS Harley 9, where it is added by Somner himself, together with a reference to a source, the Old English Liber scintillarum, a collection of patristic sayings. The entry is dotted in Dugdale, suggesting that Somner marked it for transfer to D’Ewes’s dictionary. What is puzzling is that the entry is also recorded in the errata to MS Dugdale 29 (fo.33v col. 1) with a different definition: not “free,” but “ffor Verus [“true”] ffor False, is mæne, and mænne.” Perhaps Somner first took over the entry from MS Dugdale 29 to MS Harley 9, with the explanation “free” translated into Latin and a source identified, then recorded his subsequent idea that the sense must be “true” rather than “free” in the errata to MS Dugdale 29. Or perhaps he first proposed the explanation “verus” in the errata to MS Dugdale 29 but then found the place where the word occurs in the Liber scintillarum, where the sense is certainly “free,” and transferred Dugdale’s original entry, with the reference to this source, to MS Harley 9. His final explanation, in Somner 1659, may be an attempt at a compromise: “immunis. exempt, free. q. d. incommunis. also innocent, blamelesse.” The relationship between Dugdale’s original dictionary, Somner’s errata, D’Ewes’s dictionary as emended by Somner, and Somner’s published dictionary is not altogether straightforward.

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5.3 Somner learns from Dugdale and D’Ewes If Somner’s Dictionarium was a breakthrough in the Old English lexicographic tradition, the great contribution given by some preceding unpublished dictionaries, like D’Ewes’s and Dugdale’s, must not be disregarded or undervalued. The comparison of the three lexicographers’ work on which this is an initial report4 shows how the “first” Somner, that is Somner as assistant in the making of D’Ewes’s dictionary, depended directly on Dugdale’s manuscript. We do not want to play down Somner’s importance as antiquarian and lexicographer. He managed to mix all the ingredients, the devices at his disposal, in order to compile his own Dictionarium, unarguably a noteworthy lexicographic goal, but one for which the credit is to be assigned not to Somner alone, but to the intense activity of generations of scholarship. He depended on the work of men who toiled patiently with remarkably difficult manuscripts and who generously transmitted their own work, one to another, in order to recover the literary and historical treasures of their ancient countrymen. (Hetherington 1982, 86)

Their aim was to retrieve their own ancestors’ legacy and strengthen the cornerstone of English identity. Albert Marckwardt described twentieth-century dictionaries as “the culmination of an evolutionary process,” seeing the making of Laurence Nowell’s Vocabularium saxonicum as an early stage in that process (Marckwardt 1952, 1); by the time Somner published his dictionary in 1659, Anglo-Saxon lexicography had been evolving for decades, and this was to his advantage (cf. ibid. 16). Comparing the dictionaries compiled by Dugdale, D’Ewes, and Somner means following the evolution of the lexicographic tradition, which saw in Nowell the first “restorer of the Saxon language” and in Somner the antiquarian who first saw his Old English dictionary published. Sue Hetherington (1982, 79) writes that the connections among these lexicographers and their patrons make the early history of Old English lexicography a continuous chain whose links, neither identical nor equal, reveal the individual strengths and weaknesses of their makers. The dictionaries that these men produced reveal the continuity of their work and the readiness of each scholar to make available to successors the results of his labours. 4

I intend to carry on this research, and hope to publish my further findings and conclusions elsewhere.

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6. Conclusions The starting point of our comparison is Dugdale’s dictionary, which provided a decisive support both to the compilation of the unpublished Dictionarium by D’Ewes and Somner’s published dictionary of 1659, which belongs to a more advanced phase in the lexicographic tradition. Somner indeed gained experience, maturity and critical insight thanks to his previous collaborations, mainly with D’Ewes when compiling his dictionary. D’Ewes forwent his goal to publish the first Old English dictionary because of his political career as member of Parliament from 1640 to 1648. In a letter dated January 20, 1648, Dugdale himself exhorts him “not to giue way to any diuersion from those soe worthy and good workes” and refers again to the precious help “of yt learned gentleman now wth you” (Hamper 1827, 218), who is William Somner. Somner was aware of Dugdale’s contribution to his Dictionarium and included him at the end among those friends who enabled him to publish it: Gulielmus Dugdale, de Blith-hall in Com. Warwic, Gen. de quo vide Dictionar. in voce hlæwe. (Somner 1659, sig. Ttt2v)

And indeed the entry hlæwe reads: ...whereof we have a large and learned discourse in that accurate and elaborate Description of Warwickshire by (the great retriver of our English Antiquities) my noble friend, Mr. William Dugdale: one (to do him right) without whose most active and effectual assistance in the publication of it, this work had never seen the light.

Dugdale, who never wrote about his own lexicographical work, did record this acknowledgement in his autobiography, though he refers to the wrong entry in Somner’s dictionary: Moreover he [Dugdale] was the chief promoter in publishing the Saxon Dictionary compiled by Mr. Wilm Somner of Canterbury, and printed at Oxford in ao [1659] as is acknowledged by the sayd Mr. Somner under the word siþesoca. (Hamper 1827, 37)

As this paper has shown, however, Dugdale was more than a patron: his lexicographic work was a decided help to the lexicographers who were to follow him.

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Appendix 1: selected errata from Dugdale’s dictionary Errata headword Angenga. Angenge. Bric-bote.

Brune-wyrt. Copesdom.

Cwanunge. Cwydelease.

Cymenen. Eafora. Eagliscre. Earleppen.

Egenwirhte.

Errata definition Passing item forte Gangenga Wandring. For Gangenge A penalty. Rather pontis instauratio bote here signifying as in hedgebote, Ploughbote item Teuerion or Teverion priviledge of habit. Item […?] for a part of Biscopesdom, Episcopatus trembling. For cwacunge Carelessnesse. Rather, either speechlesse, or Intestate, as in Cnutis p.2. ca.68 Quiminon. Or Cyminum Heire. For Heafora. Iuvinca. A Eafor. Angelicall. For Engliscre The upper part of the eare. Rather the lower parte or lapp of the eare Merchandize quaere

Original entry

Location in the MS.

q . Angenge wandringe q . Bric-Bote a penalty for not repairing bridges

fo. 16r col. 3

Brune-wyrt the fo. 45v col. 2 herbe called… q . lat: Teuerion fo. 63r col. 1 q . Copes-dom priuiledge of habitt cwacunge trembling, fo. 71r quaking fo. 69r col. 3 cwydeleas speechclesse, carelessnesse Cymenen the herbe called cumin (a.m.) lat. quiminon eafora heire

fo. 69v col. 2

eagliscre Angelicall

fo. 87r col. 3

earleppen the vpper [corrected to lower] parte of the Eare

fo. 88r col. 3

egenwirhte merchandize

fo. 90r col. 3

fo. 87r col. 3

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Errata headword Ehstan. Ehsyne.

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Errata definition

Original entry Ehstan highest q. ehsyne the face or countenance

Fean. Feon.

Highest. For Hehstan Facies. The face, countenance. Forte Ensyne, or Ansyne Returning. For gewendende Yeister. For Easterday. For gyrsan-day or yesterday A reward. For Edlean, or else ece-lean, an Eternall reward. ... fro 8v Spelm Counce. p. 411 Inferior. quære. Breath. For æþme. ffæthme enim a Fathom, or Fadome. Ioy. For gefean. Id.

Fiendwice.

Tents. For Fýrdwica.

Forgiendan.

Sorrowfull. For Sorgiendan.

Foste. Friccan-scire.

Frost. For Forst. A preacher. Rather a Preachers charge or office. Præconis munus. Yeldhall. Rather a

Eowendende. Estra-day. Exelian.

Færbena. Fæthme.

Frýgýldum.

Location in the MS. fo. 90v col. 1 fo. 90r col. 1

yeister-day [yeister altered to Easter]

fo. 93v col. 2

Exelian a reward [definition added in another hand]

fo. 95r col. 3

fær-bena a rustic fæþma cubitts, fathoms

fo. 95v col. 2 fo. 96r col. 2

fean joy, delight feon glad, merry, rejoice fiendwice tents [underlined for correction, with corrected form fierdwice in margin] forgiendan sorrowfull [first three letters underlined for correction, with corrected form sor in margin] foste froste friccan-shire a preacher

fo. 97v col. 3 fo. 98v col. 3

frygildNJ yeldhall

fo. 100v col. 3

fo. 106v col. 1

fo. 110v col. 1 fo. 112v col. 1

fo. 113r col. 1

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Errata headword Fulfaran. Fýrðrignes.

Gavelgelda.

Gebacen. Gedwolan.

Gehentan. Gederian. Hæbbendre handa.

Hæman.

Hell-spuran.

Errata definition free-guild, or society priviledged. To travaile. Quære. For Faran alone signifies to travaile. Exultatio bonorum, quære. For Exaltatio Promotio. Fýrþrion enim promovere sonat Gabli redditio. Rather Censum reddens, or pendens, as in the LL. of Ine cap. 22. Bacon. For Baked. Fury. Rage. Rather Errors a dwolian errare or whence a Hereticke, gewolman. Overtake. Rather to pursue, to catch or snatch. to promote. Rather to Hurt or Harme For aet hæbbendra handa which signifies any one that is taken in the manner, or with the thing stollen about him.

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Original entry

Location in the MS.

ful-faran to trauaile

fo. 113r col. 3

q. fyrþringnes exultatio bonorum

fo. 114r col. 1

gauel-gelda gabli redditio

fo. 117r col. 3

ge-bacen bacon fo. 118r col. 2 ge-dwolan rage, fury fo. 119v col. 1

. gehentan take

fo. 120r col. 1

gederian promote, fo. 121v col. 1 further fo. 144v col. 1 hæbbendre-handa any thing stolen and found vpon ye partye [keyed to reference in margin: Lamb: de leg. sax: fol: 58b. 68b.] to fornicate. Hæmeras hæme to fornicate, fo. 146r col. 1 hæmænne to Adulterers… [?] so fornicate hæman (and take it) without unriht proposed for hæman alone signifies but coire the heele. Rather hell spuran the heele fo. 150v col. 2 spurres

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Errata headword Heralt.

Herelafe.

Iceled. Ic ðies wen.

Ier on fehþ. Lædenlicum. Læcendomum [sic: sc. læcedomum] Liþ-adle.

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Errata definition

Original entry

Quaere for it is an old word which the saxons used for it wær-boda and wærbydel.

Heralt compounded of here wch signifieth an army & healt which (in ye antient teutonick) signifies a couragious person, dothe therefore rightly singifye the champion of ye army [keyed to reference in margin: Versteg: p. 321.] . herelafe remnant fo. 152r col. 2

Remnant. Rather the remnant of the army force laf alone signifies a remnant, as here doth an army For geled peradventure.ad verbum, ego sic opinor. But I correct nothing …[?], only illustrate the expression. yet peradventure with …[?] was expressed by wenunga For er-onfehþ of metall. Rather of lead wholesome. Rather medicines, forte liþ signifies a member, ioynt, and adle a disease, haply then morbus articularis. A disease

Location in the MS. fo. 151v col. 3

q. iceled led, brought fo. 163r col. 1 fo. 163r col. 1 q. icðieswen peraduenture

q. ier onfehþ anticipeth . lædenlicum of mettall q. læce domum wholesome

fo. 163r col. 2

. liþ-adle the disease called….

fo. 178v col. 1

fo. 169v col. 1 fo. 169v col. 1

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Errata headword Liþ-wyrt.

Lupinus montanus. Mar-beamas. Manþeof.

Mod welegost. Mund-byrd.

Newelnyssa. Nittienne. Nyttweorðuste. Ofersewen.

Errata definition

Original entry

in the ioynts, the palsey. Ostriago quaere. For . liþ-wyrt ye herbe there is no just word called…lat.ostriago as Ostriago that I find. Some herbe it may be in the cure of liþ-adle For Mountaine pulse . lupinus montanus ye herbe called….. mulberies. Rather q. mar-beamas mulbery trees. mulberyes item for he that q. manþeof a theife steales or Nagge. For wch taketh away a so the word occures in man priuily the LL.of Alfred cap.9.as I (comparing it with the Senatus consult[us] pag. 9 cap.7) understand it. Id es forte dictum qui mod welegost [no est animo optimo. A definition] gallant-mindedman. Breach item. Quaere. q. mund-byrd breach of the peace Poti[us] Protection, of the churche Patronage, Defence. Secutiry. The Breach mundbyrde, munde of Churches peace is portection cyrices-mund-bryce mundbyrde mundbyrdun refuge, tuition, protection Clouds. For Abyssus. q. newelnyssa cloudes To eate. Quaere. For q. nyttienne to eate etanne, is to eate. More (it should be q. nytt-weorðuste Most) profitable. more profitably Respect is […] Rather q. ofer-sewen the contrary, with respect, contempt, as oferseo, consideration

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Location in the MS. fo. 178v col. 1

fo. 180v col. 1 fo. 184r col. 1 fo. 184r col. 3

fo. 190r col. 3 fo. 193r col. 2

fo. 197r col. 3 fo. 199v col. 3 fo. 200r col. 2 fo. 201v col. 1

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Errata headword

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Errata definition

Redfedon.

contemno. Superfluity. Rather Superflous, whilest Superfluity is with the Sax. ofereaca. For Olusatrum. The black-leaved. Lovage For. wthout amends, recompence or satisfaction. See the LL. Æthered. par. 2. cap. 3. Robbed. For reafedon

Regeorde.

Speech. For gereorde

Oferlifa.

Olisatrum. Orgylde.

Rerenesse. Rihta. Sæfnum. Sæmnan. Sambryce.

Sanwisan. Secgean. Secgeonde.

Original entry

Location in the MS.

ofer-lifa sup[er]fluitye q

fo. 202v col. 2

. olisatrum the herbe fo. 203r col. 3 called…… . orgylde [no fo. 207v col. 3 definition]

q. redfedon robbed

fo. 233r col. 2

q. regeorde speech, language Sruelty. For reðenesse q. rerenesse cruellty

fo. 233v col. 1

An author, or cause. Quære. For wyrhta Sleepe. For swæfnum Virgins rather Fæmnan Violate. Rather: halfe a breach it is found in the councells pag. 207 cap or sect: 9 where it is distinguished from fullbryce (an intire break) in the evidence For samwisan

fo. 237vcol. 1

q. rihta an author or cause q. sæfnum sleepe q. sæmnan virgins, maydens q sam-bryce [illegible definition added in a third hand]

fo. 235r col. 1

fo. 243v col. 1 fo. 243v col. 2 fo. 244vcol. 1

q. san-wisan foolish, fo. 244vcol. 3 halfe-witted q. secgean yield, pay fo. 250r col. 2

Yield, pay q it rather signifies to say or speak sellan to pay For saying, rehearsing q . secgonde the participle secgenne to tell, rehearse, saying,

fo. 250r col. 2

"Certaine Things to be Considered & Corrected in Will. Dugdales Saxon-Lexicon"

Errata headword

Errata definition

Sreg.

Sound item For sweg

Srecaþ. Sroþolla.

For specaþ For throtbolla

Srymednys.

For Trymednys

Suarmodnesse.

For slownesse. Starknesse. For Id swarmodnes in Sr. Simonde Dewes booke. For Tælwyrþe

Tælwywþe. Ðalendene. Ðeodgan.

Tyhtle.

Tyht-busig.

Loynes: Delend. (for) Ða Forrein item For Alþeodigan [the reading may possibly be Ælþeodigan, as recorded in BosworthToller] Counterfeited, adulterated. Quære. Rather accused. Error autem [?] forte. Sine [?] quod Insimulatus Accusatum æque ac fictum, et simulatum signat. A man of ill fame. Item This is rather a paraphrase, then an exposition, for word signifies one often accused, or impeached.

Original entry speaking q. sreg sounde, noyse srecaþ speaketh sroþolla the wind pipe srymednys strength, stronge holde . suarmodnesse

67

Location in the MS. fo 266r col. 3 fo. 266v col. 1 fo. 266v col. 1 fo. 266v col. 1 fo. 271r col. 2

q tæl-wywþe worthy fo. 279r col. 1 of reprehension q. þælendene loynes fo. 282v col. 3 ðeodgan forrein. aliens

fo. 283v col. 2

tyhtle accusation counterfeited q adulterated

fo. 297v col. 3

q. tyht-bysig a man fo. 298r col. 1 of ill fame or reputation [keyed to note lamb: de leg: sax: fol:78.b]

68

Errata headword Vica pervica. Vn-æmtan. Vnæsegenlic. Utwara.

Wældnysse.

Chapter Five

Errata definition

Original entry

Forte Vinca pervinca. i.e. Periwinckle Necessity. Quære

q.uica-peruica ye herbe called ... q. unæmtan necessity q.unæsegenlic insatiable

Insatiable. For. unaseðenlic, quod Vide Supply for warre, item Rather Utfara. Expeditio militaris.A point out to warr, or warfare. Poverty. For wædlnysse

Wæsersyne.

A spectacle. Item. Rather wæfersyne.

Ware-morgangyfe.

A dowry. Ware is to be expunged, for morgangyfe alone so signifies. This word (I perceive) comes from Cnutes LL par. 2. cap. 71. where we have ware for þare, signifying in that place, that. Do imagine, or are of opinion. Rather ymbsærwa. Betray. Ensnare. Seige. Rather ymbsetes. Sitting about. Rather ymbsittendan. Besetting. hast formed. For. Scypodest.

Ymb-ræswe.

Ymb-retes. Ymb-rittendan. Yþodest.

Location in the MS. fo. 299v col. 1 fo. 300v col. 3 fo. 301r col. 1

q.utwara supply for fo. 306v col. 3 warr or defence of ye Realme [keyed to note Seld: tit: of Honor. p: 698.] q.wældnysse fo. 307v col. 3 pouerty, misery q. wæsersyne a spectacle,or place to view q. ware-morgangyfe a dowry

fo. 310r col. 1

q. ymb-ræswe doe imagine, or are of opinion

fo. 326v col. 3

q. ymbretes a seige,

fo. 327r col. 1

q. ymbrittendan sitting about

fo. 327r col. 1

q.yþodest hast formed, or made

fo. 327r col. 3

fo. 311v col. 3

"Certaine Things to be Considered & Corrected in Will. Dugdales Saxon-Lexicon"

69

Appendix 2: Comparison of the table of errata in Dugdale’s dictionary with entries marked for correction in the text of the dictionary Letter

Entries

Entries with Entries Entries source preceded by recorded in indicated q the errata

A B C D E F G H I L M N O P Q R S T Þ U W Y Z Total

2473 1936 1071 637 853 2150 3083 1923 229 1081 1016 536 1052 151 3 538 2779 890 867 778 2036 241 1 26324

4 3 13 7 8 6 10 15 1 3 6 1 4 1 0 2 14 6 5 2 20 0 0 131

2 4 1 0 1 1 12 14 1 17 16 5 14 0 0 8 34 21 26 19 39 10 0 244

2 3 4 0 9 11 31 13 4 9 12 3 16 0 0 6 39 14 15 21 29 6 0 247

q-entries shared with the errata 2 3 1 0 1 1 7 6 3 2 9 3 11 0 0 6 24 10 13 16 26 6 0 150

Chapter Five

70

Appendix 3. Comparison of the errata in Dugdale’s dictionary, the original entries in that dictionary, and the corresponding entries in D’Ewes’s dictionary and Somner’s dictionary Errata in MS Dugdale 29 Angenga. Passing id[em] forte Gangenga Angenge. Wandring for Gangenge Bric-bote. A penalty. Rather pontis instauratio. bote here signifying as in hedgebote, Ploughbote it.

Dugdale’s original entry q . angenga coming out

D’Ewes’s dictionary

q. angenge wandringe

angenge Idem angenga bric-bote Vide Bricgbote brycgbuta Id.

Brune-wyrt. Teuerion or Teverion

q . bricg-bote a penalty for not repairing bridges [cf. fo. 47v col. 1: brycgbuta a penalty for rep[er]acion of bridges.] brune-wyrt the herbe called … q lat: Teuerion

Cwanunge. trembling. For cwacunge

cwacunge trembling, quaking

Cwydelease. Carelessnesse. Rather, either speechlesse, or Intestate, as in Cnutis p. 2. ca. 68

cwydeleas speechlesse, carelessnesse

brune-wyrt. Teuerion. Quibusd. Pimpernell

Somner’s dictionary

Brycg-bote. i.e. bricg-bote

Brune-wyrt. Quibusdam, splenium, aspleniu. Spleen-wort, miltwast. aliis autem, scrophularia minor. brown-wort, waterbetony. cwacunge tremor. Cwacunge Tremor. A trembling A trembling, shaking or quaking for fear. Cwyde-leas. cwydeleas. Intestatus. intestate, Intestatus. Sine without any will. distributione item, mutus. rerum suarum. Cnut. 2. p. 68. It. speechlesse. He læg cwide-lease. jacuit Multus. mutus. he lay Speechlesse speechlesse.

"Certaine Things to be Considered & Corrected in Will. Dugdales Saxon-Lexicon"

Errata in MS Dugdale 29 Cymenen. Quiminon. Or Cyminum

Dugdale’s original entry cymenen the herbe called cummin [in another hand:] lat. quiminon eafora heire

D’Ewes’s dictionary cymenen Id Cymyn. Cyminum. Cummyn. Matt.23.23

Earleppen. The upper part of the eare. Rather the lower parte or lapp of the eare

earleppen the vpper [corrected to lower] parte of the Eare

earleppen. Auricula. LobusThe eare-lapp or lower part of the eare.

Egenwirhte. Merchandize quaere

egenwirhte merchandize

Ehsyne. Facies. The face, countence. Forte Ensyne, or Ansyne Estra-day. Yeister. For Easter-day. For gyrsan-day or yesterday Exelian. A reward. For Edlean, or else ece-lean, an Eternall reward. .fro 8v Spelm Counce. P. 411

q. ehsyne the face or countenance

Eafora. Heire. For Heafora.Iuvinca. A Eafor.

ehsyne. Facies. Vultus. The face. Countenance.

71

Somner’s dictionary Cymene. i.e. cumin. suþerne cymen. cyminum Syriacum. cummin of Syria. Eafora. Haeres, proles, natus. an heire, a child, a sonne … Ear-læppe. (al. leppa.) Auricula, lobus. The ear-lap, the lower part of the ear. Belgis, oorlapken Egen-wirhte. Psalm.126.4. Merces. hir, wages, a gift. Ehsyne. Facies, vultus. the face, the countenance.

yeister-day estra Dæg. [yeister altered to Pascha. Easterday Easter]

estra-dæg. i. easter-dæg. Pascha

exelian a reward. [“edlean, edleane rewarde” is a different entry]

Ed-lean. Proemium, merces, compensatio, remuneratio, retributio. a reward, recompence or requitall.

edlean mede. Retributio. Hom. Remuneratio. Munus. A reward, a recompence, Laur. Luc.14.12. brauio. Greg.

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Chapter Five

Errata in MS Dugdale 29 Færbena. Inferior. quære.

Dugdale’s original entry fær-bena a rustic

D’Ewes’s dictionary færbena [no definition]

Fæthme. Breath. For æþme. ffæthme Enim a Fathom, or Fadome. Friccan-scire. A preacher. Rather a Preachers charge or office. Præconis mun[us]. Gavelgelda. Gabli redditio. Rather Censum reddens, or pendens, as in the LL. of Ine cap. 22.

fæþma cubitts, fathoms

fæþma cubitus. hom.

friccan-shire a preacher

friccanshire præconis. sc. officium. greg.

gauel-gelda gabli redditio

gauel-gelda [in Somner’s hand]

.gehentan take Gehentan. Overtake. Rather to pursue, to catch or snatch. Gystenlica. gystenlica Yesterday. Rather yesterday guestlike or hospitable. Hæman. To fornicate. Hæmeras Adulterers… [?] so (and take it)

hæme to fornicate, hæmænne to fornicate

gehentan. Prosequi. to prosecute, to pursue. gystenlic Hospitaliter. hospitability.

Somner’s dictionary fær bena Spelmanni Concil. p. 499. idem, ut doctiss. equiti ibidem visum, ac cyrlisc i. rusticus. Fæðm. Cubitus, a cubit ... Friccan-scire. Praeconis officium vel munus. the office of a Crier or Preacher. Gafol-gylda. Tributarius, debitor, censum pendens annuum. One that oweth, payeth and yeldeth tribute, a debter, a tenant paying a yearly rent. item, foenerator. an usurer. Ge-hentan i.e. hentan

Gystenlic. Hospitalis. perteining to a gest: also to one that useth hospitality. hæman on unriht. Hæman. Coire, Adulterare to concumbere, rem commit adultery. habere, carnaliter Reg. Ben. cognoscere. to ly

"Certaine Things to be Considered & Corrected in Will. Dugdales Saxon-Lexicon"

Errata in MS Dugdale 29 without unriht proposed for hæman alone signifies but coire Herelaf. Remnant. Rather the remnant of the army force laf alone signifies a remnant, as here doth an army. Inland. Inclosed lande. For demeane land, land hold in demeane, the rest (… [?] to tenants) being called utland

73

Dugdale’s original entry hæman

D’Ewes’s dictionary

Somner’s dictionary with or have to do with a woman. ...

.herelafe remnant

here-lafe. Exercitus reliquus. the remnant of the army.

Here-laf. Exercitus reliquae. the remnant or remaines left of an army

.inland. inclosed inland. Eadg.1. ground Terra dominica. demeane-land [in Somner’s hand]

In-land. Terra dominica, fundus Domini proprius, ipsius usibus reservatus, nec fructuariis elocatus. Demeane-land. )( utland. Læcendomum. [sc. q. læce domum læcedom. Medelã Læcedome. læcedomum] wholesome a medicine Hym. Medicamentum, wholesome. rather MedicamentNJ medela, remedium, medicines, forte Greg. Past. malagma. a medicine, a læcedome RemediNJ. A remedy, a remedy Lib. mollifying plaister Scintill. fo.16.a [in or pultesse. Somner’s hand] Lædenlicum of .lædenlicum of lædendlic. Lædenlic. metall. Rather of mettall Plumbeus. of lead, Plumbeus. leaden, lead. or leaden [in or of lead. Somner’s hand] Liþ-adle. Liþ .liþ-adle the liþ-adle. Morbus Lið-adl. Morbus signifies a member, disease called…. (forte) articularis. articularis. the gout. ioynt, and adle a A disease in the diseasae, haply then joynts [in Somner’s hand] morbus articularis. A disease in the ioynts, the palsey. Liþ-wyrt. Ostriago. . liþ:wyrt ye liþ-wyrt. herba Liþe-wyrt.

74

Errata in MS Dugdale 29 Quaere. For there is no just word as Ostriago that I find. Some herbe it may be in the cure of liþ-adle. Lupinus montanus. For Mountaine pulse

Chapter Five

Dugdale’s original entry herbe called … lat.ostriago

D’Ewes’s dictionary called quaedam est (forte) dicta quatrubus sanandis aptis [in Somner’s hand]

Somner’s dictionary Ostriago. N. Erision Herbar. vet. Ms.

. lupinus montanus ye herbe called ...

Lupinus montanus. herba sic dicta forte Mountaine pulse [in Somner’s hand] mar-beamas. Mori. Mulbery treees [in Somner’s hand] man-þeof. V. LL. Alfredi. cap. 9

[no entry]

mundbyrd. patrocinium. Gloss. Cant. violatio pacis

Mund-byrde. Patrocinium, praesidium, protectio, tutela, patronage, aid, defence, protection. ...

Mar-beamas. Mulberies. Rather mulbery trees.

q. mar-beamas mulberyes

Manþeof. Item. For he that steales a Nagge. For so the word occures in the LL.of Alfred cap. 9. as I (comparing it with the Senatus consultNJ pag. 9 cap. 7) understand it. Mund-byrd. Breach […] Quaere poti[us] Protection, Patronage, Defence. Security. The Breach of Churches peace is cyrices-mund-bryce

q. manþeof a theife wch taketh away a man priuily

q. mund-byrd breach of the peace of the churche mundbyrde, munde portection mundbyrde mund-byrdum refuge, tuition, protection

Mar-beam. Morus. the mulberry tree. man-ðeof [s.v. man “mannus”] LL. Aluredi Reg. c. 9. manni raptor. a nag-stealer. Foed. Aluredi & Guthruni RR. c. 4. be mannum. i. de manno.

"Certaine Things to be Considered & Corrected in Will. Dugdales Saxon-Lexicon"

Errata in MS Dugdale 29 Newelnyssa. Clouds. For Abyssus.

Dugdale’s original entry q. newelnyssa cloudes

D’Ewes’s dictionary neolnesse, infernum. hell. Laur. Abyssus. neolnys. id Newelnyss. abyssus. Ælfr.

Nyttweorðuste. More (it should be Most) profitable

q. nyttweorðuste more profitably

nyttweorðuste. Utilissimu[s]. Most P[ro]fitable

Ofersewen. q. ofer-sewen Respect. Item. respect, Rather the contrary, consideration with contempt, as oferseo, contemno. [none] . ofereacan the remaynder, or residue

ofersewen. Contemptus. Despectus. Contemned [in Somner’s hand] ofereacan. Residuum. The remainder, or residue [in Somner’s hand]

ofer-lifa sup[er]fluitye q

oferlifa. Residuum. a Remainder, or remnant [in Somner’s hand]

Oferlifa. Superfluity. Rather Superflous, whilest Superfluity is with the Sax. ofereaca [see the row above] Olisatrum. For OlusatrNJ. The black-leaved. Lovage. [none]

75

Somner’s dictionary Neolnesse. i.e. neowolnesse [cf. neowolnesse. Profundum abyssus. the deep, an abysse, a bottomlesse gulf or pit.] nyt-wyrþost [recorded s. v. nytwyrð, variant of nyt-weorþ] [apparently not recorded; though cf. ofersewennysse]. Ofer-eac. (al. eaca.) Additamentum, auctarium, a surplusage or overplus. it. reliquum, residuum. a remainder. Ofer-lifa. Residuum, reliquum. the remainder or residue, a remnant, that which is left. Olisatrum. Olus atrum. Alisander or lovage.

. olisatrum the olisatrum. Herba herbe called…… sic dicta. Forte. Olusatrum. the black-leaved Lovage [in Somner’s hand] orfgyld. V. Lamb. Orf-gyld. Rei orfgyld

76

Errata in MS Dugdale 29

Orgylde. For. wthout amends, recompence or satisfaction. See the LL. Æthered. par. 2. cap. 3.

Chapter Five

Dugdale’s original entry forisfactura rerNJ: calumniarum [keyed to a reference in the margin, Lamb: de leg: Sax: fol.126.a.] . orgylde [no definition; see row above]

D’Ewes’s dictionary fo. 126a. [in Somner’s hand]

orgylde L. Ethelred. par. 2. cap. 3.Insolutus, unrecommended, in cast of a Malefactor slaine.

Somner’s dictionary pretium. al. ceapgyld, quod vide.

Or-gylde. Legg. Æthelr. Reg. p. 2. c. 3. Sine compensatione: de eo dictum cujus vita nullo pretio redimenda est ... Redfedon. Robbed. q. redfedon reafan Rapere. Reafian. Spoliare, For reafedon robbed Spoliare. to snatch rapere, &c. to reafian ravin, spoile, to ravish, to spoile, robbe rob, &c. ... regeorde Sermo. Gereord. Lingua, Regeorde. q. regeorde Speech. For speech, language Speech. sermo.a language, Language. Laur. tongue or speech. ... gereorde Lingua. Hom Reðnesse. Saevitia Rerenesse. q. rerenesse reðnesse Cruelty. For cruellty Severitas, terror, &c. rage, cruelty, crudelitas. Greg. &c. reðenesse Past. Reg. Ben Rihta. An author, q. rihta an wyrhta Conditor, Wyrhta. Operarius, or cause. Quære. author or cause opifex. Laur. operator, opifex. a For wyrhta Artifex, factor. an worker, a workman, artificer or a wright, one by workman. Hym. whom any thing is framed ... Sæfnum. Sleepe. swefnum Somnis. Swefnian. q. sæfnum For swæfnum sleepe Matt. Somniare. to dream

"Certaine Things to be Considered & Corrected in Will. Dugdales Saxon-Lexicon"

Errata in MS Dugdale 29 Sæmnan. Virgins rather Fæmnan

Dugdale’s original entry q. sæmnan virgins, maydens

Sambryce. Violate. Rather: halfe a breach it is found in the councells pag. 207 cap or sect: 9 where it is distinguished from fullbryce (an intire break) in the evidence Sanwisan. For samwisan.

q sam-bryce [Illegible definition added in a third hand]

Secgean. Yield, pay q it rather signifies to say or speak sellan to pay Secgeonde. For saying, rehearsing the participle.

sam wisan Semi Sapiens. ælfe witted [in Somner’s hand] q. secgean yield, secgan Dicere. pay Hym. q. san-wisan foolish, halfe:witted

q .secgonde . secgenne to tell, rehearse, saying, speaking smiþ-cræft. The art q . smiþ-cræt of a smith For smiþ the art of smythe cræft Staðylodyst. Hast confounded rather hast founded

D’Ewes’s dictionary fæmnan Virginem. cas. acc. Hom.10.11. Virginis gentile. cas. Exod. 22. 16. 17 sam-bryce Semiruptis. A Breack. halfe [in Somner’s hand]

secgende Dicentes. Hym.

smiþ-cræft Ars fabrilis. the art or trade of a smith. [in Somner’s hand] staþelodest q. staðylodyst hast confounded Fundasti, hast founded or [The preceding established [in entry is for the form recorded in Somner’s hand]

77

Somner’s dictionary Fæmne. Virgo. a virgin, a maid.

Sam-bryce. Semifractura. half a breach, or a breaking half way: the moyety or half of that called fullbryce. V. Spelman. Concil. p. 207 Sam-wise. Semisapiens, hebes, bardus. but halfwitted. Secgan. Dicere, loqui, referre. to say, to speak, to rehearse, to report, to tell. ... secgend part. [recorded s.v. secgan] Smið-cræft. Ars fabrilis. the Smiths craft. Staþelian. Stabilire. to establish, to settle.

78

Chapter Five

Errata in MS Dugdale 29

Dugdale’s original entry D’Ewes: .staþelodest hast founded or established.] Suarmodnesse. For . suarmodnesse [no definition] slownesse. Starknesse. For Idem swarmodnes in Sr.Simonde Dewes booke Sreg. Sound. Item. q . sreg sounde, For sweg noyse Srecaþ. For specaþ srecaþ speaketh Sroþolla. For sroþolla the wind pipe Throtbolla

Srymednys. For Trymednys

srymednys strength, stronge holde

Tælwywþe. For Tælwyrþe

q tæl-wywþe worthy of reprehension

Ðeodgan. Forrein Item. For. Alþeodigan [the reading may possibly be Ælþeodigan, as recorded in

.ðeodgan forrein. aliens

D’Ewes’s dictionary

Somner’s dictionary

swarmodnes arditas. Gre. Past.

Swar-modnes. Tarditas, segnities, ignavia. slownesse, slacknesse, dulnesse.

sweg Strepitus. a noyse. Sonitus. a sound

Sweg. swege. Sonus, clangor, hora, accentus. a sound, a noise ...

þrotbolla Gurguglio, a throatboll or throat-pise. Gloss. Cant. et Ælfr. trynemenesse Exortatio. Exortation [in margin, in Somner’s hand] tælwyrþe. Reprehensibilis. worthy of reprehension [in Somner’s hand]

Ĉrot-bolla. ut ðrot. the throat-bowle.

Trymenesse. Persuasio. exhortatio. a persuasion, an exhortation. … tæl-wyrð. ut tælweorð. [cf. tælweorð. reprehensibilis, culpandus, reprehensione dignus. blameworthy.] Æl-þeodig. ðeodige men. extranei. ðeodgan. Exterus. extraneus, Id [in Somner’s peregrinus. a stranger, a foreiner, hand] a pilgrim. ælþeodigan. verb.

"Certaine Things to be Considered & Corrected in Will. Dugdales Saxon-Lexicon"

Errata in MS Dugdale 29 Bosworth-Toller] Tyht-busig. A man of ill fame. Item. This is rather a paraphrase, then an exposition, for word signifies one often accused, or impeached. Vica pervica. Forte Vinca pervinca. i.e. Periwinckle

Vn-æmtan. Necessity. Quære Vnmæne. For Verus For False, is mæne, and mænne.

Utwara. Supply for warre. Item. Rather Utfara. Expeditio militaris.A point out to warr, or warfare. Ware-morgangyfe. A dowry. Ware is to be expunged, for morgangyfe alone so signifies. This

Dugdale’s original entry

D’Ewes’s dictionary

Somner’s dictionary

q. tyht-bysig a man of ill fame or reputation [keyed to reference lamb: de leg: sax: fol: 78.b]

tyhtbysig. homo saepe accusatus

Tyht-bysig. Crebrae accusationis infamia notatus. one that is often accused.

q.uica-peruica uinca Peruinca. ye herbe called ... Vinca pervina. Perwinckle [in Somner’s hand]

79

Uinca peruinca. Vinca pervinca. herba sic Plinio nuncupata. aliis, Clematis Daphnoides, Chamae-daphnes. Periwinkle. q.unæmtan unæmtan. modo Un-æmtan. Modo. necessity Reg. Can. instantly, presently, anon. .un mæne Free unmæne. Un-mæne. Immunis. exempt, Immunes. Free. Lib Scint. fo.27.b. free. q. d. incommunis. also [in Somner’s innocent, hand] blamelesse. ... q. utwara supply utfare. egredior, Ut-fare. i.e. ut-fær. for warr or [Cf. Ut-fær. ut exeo. Ælfr. It. defence of ye Exitus. Expeditio. færeld. Exitus, Realme [keyed An out.going.An egressus, expeditio. to reference Expedition [in an issue, a going “Seld: tit: of Somner’s hand] out, an expedition.] Honor. p: 698.”] q.ware-morganMorgan-gife, vel gyfe a dowry gifu. Dos. a dower or dowry. ...

80

Chapter Five

Errata in MS Dugdale’s Dugdale 29 original entry word (I perceive) comes from Cnutes LL par.2.cap. 71. where we have ware for þare, signifying in that place, that.

D’Ewes’s dictionary

Somner’s dictionary

CHAPTER SIX ALPHABET FATIGUE AND COMPILING CONSISTENCY IN EARLY ENGLISH DICTIONARIES N. E. OSSELTON 1. Introduction: the lopsidedness of early English dictionaries Until the advent of the computer, dictionary makers worked under the tyranny of the alphabet, proceeding as a matter of course from A to Z; and though our dictionaries today are no longer graced with titles such as Abcedarium or Table alphabeticall, the alphabetic ordering of entries remains their chief organizing principle. The common user will indeed in general be only dimly aware even of the conventional minor deviations from the alphabet by which derivations, compound words, and other awkward details are accommodated. But in thus, as Dr Johnson puts it, “beating the track of the alphabet” (Johnson 1747, 1), compilers in the past seem not always to have devoted as much attention to words at the end of the alphabet as they had done to those at the beginning. As a result, nearly all our early dictionaries are noticeably lopsided, fuller at the beginning than at the end, and the record they provide of the English vocabulary of their day must be seen to be correspondingly unbalanced. This phenomenon seems hitherto to have escaped the attention of lexicographical historians, and the object of the present study is to trace its effect in English dictionaries from Cawdrey onwards.

2. The scale of imbalance in early dictionaries: mid-point words One rough-and-ready way of finding out whether a compiler has been evenhanded is to see what word occurs halfway through a dictionary, as calculated by page numbers (in early works, by signatures). The word at mid-point of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1995) is machinable. Other recent dictionaries of differing sizes and from various publishing houses yielded main (Chambers

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2003), market (Collins Paperback 2003), lotto (Longman 2003), literal (NODE 1998), Lycra (New Penguin, 2004). This suggests that for English dictionaries today we can reasonably take the latter part of L or the beginning of M as the middle point in the lexicographer’s labours. But in Cawdrey the mid-point word comes very much earlier, at insult, and even Dr Johnson was half way through at the beginning of L (landmark). The following is a list for the principal pre-Johnsonian dictionaries of English: Dictionary Cawdrey 1604 Bullokar 1616 Cockeram 1623 Part I Cockeram 1623 Part II Blount 1656 Phillips 1658 Coles 1676 Gazophylacium anglicanum 1689 J.K. 1702 Cocker 1704/1715 Kersey–Phillips 1706 Glossographia anglicana nova 1707/1719 Kersey 1708 Bailey UEED 1721 Bailey DB 1730 Defoe 1735 Martin 1749

Mid-point word insult humiliate inexpiable kingdome locution Itylus knapsack hold municipal Kent lachryma justice interjection Kenric juncare Julian moulder

This shows that with the startling exceptions of J.K. and Martin, all the early dictionaries of English are skewed in favour of first part of the alphabet. The contrast between the pattern in the other items listed above and what is to be found in modern dictionaries may be represented diagrammatically: H 17th – 18th cent. 20th – 21st cent.

I hu-

J

K

L

M loli-

N me-

This shows only a small overlap in the positioning of the mid-point word; there is much greater variability in the works of the early compilers, but nearly all of them can be seen to have inflated the early part of the alphabet.

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The scale of distortion may be considerable: in modern dictionaries, the words as far as humiliate will normally account for rather less than forty per cent of the whole, but in Bullokar (1616) they take up half of it; again, in our modern dictionaries the letters A and T will be found to be generally of about the same length, but with the drastic scaling down found in Cawdrey (1604) the letter T ends up at less than half the length of A. The two exceptions in the above table, J.K. (1702, generally taken to be John Kersey) and Martin (1749), are both acknowledged to have been innovators whose works stand somewhat outside the main hard-word tradition. Kersey, “an intelligent critic of his predecessors and a vigorous reformer” (Starnes and Noyes 1946, 71), broke with the common practice of his day by turning to bilingual dictionaries to produce a radically new nomenclature with common English words (Osselton 1995, 25–33). Benjamin Martin also turned to the bilingual dictionaries (Latin–English, in his case), so as to get away from the ingrained lexicographical habit of mere word-plus-sense listing, and his work “marks a change in the concept of a dictionary and of the lexicographer’s function” (Starnes and Noyes 1946, 146).

3. Causes of uneven alphabetic coverage A chance aberration in the build-up of their vocabulary on the part of one or two early compilers would be of no great consequence. But where there is a general pattern of alphabetical tailing-off affecting most compilers over a period of 150 years it is worth looking into some likely reasons for it, other than the very natural one of mere fatigue on the part of the compiler.

3.1. The character of the hard-word list One possible reason for the disparity between the earliest English dictionaries and their modern counterparts might be sought in the fact that the compilers (at least down to J.K. in 1702) were mainly concerned with the socalled “hard words” from the classical languages, generally omitting the commonest native terms since (in their view) these needed no explanation anyway. Clearly this could be a factor in the build-up of their somewhat patchy word lists. Cawdrey’s Table alphabeticall has, for instance, no entries at all under the letter W, and there could of course have been no words there from the Latin; on the other hand, any distortion in the alphabetical build-up caused by this is partly offset earlier on by a similar absence of any entries—either Latin or native—starting with the letter K. A great number of the “hard words” in the dictionaries occur in clusters under the common Latin prefixes. These are for the most part well spread, with

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early ones such as ab-, ad-, com-, con-, de-, dis- nicely balanced later on in the alphabet by ob-, per-, pre-, pro-, re-, sub-, etc. The most productive of them all is im-/in-, which (for instance) accounts for about 700 of the 11,000 entries in Phillips’s New world of English words (1658). Since im-/in- comes near the middle of the alphabet, this is likely to have had some effect on the precise location of the mid-point words as these are seen in the table above; even so, we may note that in two of the early dictionaries in the table the compiler had reached the half-way mark well before he came to the combined letter I/J. The clearest evidence of the very limited effect of the Latinate “hard words” on the build-up of dictionary nomenclature is however provided by Cockeram’s dictionary (1623). Alone among the early compilers he divides his vocabulary of English into two alphabetical lists—Part I for hard words (“the choicest words themselves now in use”) and Part II for the everyday (“vulgar”) language. But the mid-point words in his two lists (inexpiable and kingdome) are not significantly far apart.

3.2. Pressures of publication Publishing circumstances may variously affect the build-up of a dictionary as it comes into being. The distinctive pattern noted above—thick at the beginning, thin at the end—is for instance the exact opposite of what is found in our great nineteenth and twentieth-century historical dictionaries. Richard W. Bailey has noted that “all the major dictionaries (OED, its Supplements, the MED, and the DOST) grow considerably more comprehensive and detailed through the alphabet as the editors grow more ambitious or less restrained” (Bailey 1987, 138). This is true not only of the English dictionaries: in the Deutsches Wörterbuch of the Grimm brothers the entry for the colour blue, blau, has two columns; but rot for the colour red (published 33 years later) has thirteen columns (Osselton 2000, 61); similarly, Martin Gellerstam has pointed out that in the Danish historical dictionary there is “a big difference in coverage between the first and the last volumes” with, for instance, an entry for dreng “boy” which is only half the length of the one for pige “girl” (Gellerstam 2003, 64). With such multi-volume products of institutional lexicography it is evident that the promise or hope of long-term financing may have emboldened successive editors to expand their activities. Whether it was ever publishers’ or printers’ deadlines which led to the contraction of contents in the early dictionaries is of course impossible to establish with any certainty, though it is at least reasonable to suppose that this could happen. It is unlikely in the case of Bullokar (1616), whose list was compiled initially for private use (“Epistle Dedicatorie,” sig. A2r), or of Blount, who tells us (“To the Reader,” sig. A3r) that he spent his spare time over twenty

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years in putting together his dictionary of 1656. On the other hand, publisher’s pressure on Dr Johnson has been well documented, with an evident threat of payments being withheld as the three years projected for the Dictionary stretched on to nearly nine (Sledd and Kolb 1955, 108; Reddick 1990, 59–60). In the Scott–Bailey dictionary of 1755, stuffed full of material plundered from Johnson, it appears to have been the printers themselves who saw to the retrenchments in the text, “omitting both authorities and quotations as the work progressed and they felt increasingly pressed for space” (Starnes and Noyes 1946, 185). Among the eighteenth-century monolingual works, perhaps the clearest instance of dictionary contraction as a result of publishing pressures is the Complete English dictionary, or, general repository of the English language, compiled by the Reverend Frederick Barlow “Assisted by several other Gentlemen,” and published in two volumes in 1772. This has (astonishingly) a mid-point word at get. Barlow’s work had been published initially by subscription in twenty-four numbers (Alston 1966b, item 282), and in an “Advertisement” included later before the letter A in the bound volumes of 1772 we find an apology addressed to the purchasers: the editor had not been able “to comprize [his dictionary] within the proposed Limits, without departing from his Plan, and consequently abridging some Part of the Work.” By way of compensation, subscribers were thus being offered a double number at the same price as other numbers. There is evidence enough here, then, to show that in Barlow’s dictionary the tailing-off in the alphabet arose from commercial constraints rather than from any lack of diligence or enthusiasm on the part of the compiler.

3.3. Inherited word-lists It has been abundantly shown (Noyes 1939; Starnes and Noyes 1945) that the compilers of the earliest English monolingual dictionaries commonly arrived at their lists of words by drawing on the works of their predecessors, on glossaries and on the bilingual (including Latin) dictionaries of the day. The dictionary thus evolved by a process of accretion, with a tangled web of influence and borrowing which often verged upon plagiarism; so much so, that a case has been made out (Dolezal 1986, 47) for viewing these dictionaries not as individual works but rather as a single text, and the men who produced them as editors rather than authors. The persistence of the skewed pattern noted above might well be seen as a further argument for supporting this view. Such a pattern of dependency inevitably focuses attention on the first compiler Cawdrey (1604), whose brief but unbalanced list of English entrywords might be seen to have had a knock-on effect on his successors; though

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given the sheer scale of dictionary expansion during the ensuing century (from just over 2,000 words in Cawdrey to over 10,000 in Kersey–Phillips, 1706) it is perhaps unlikely that that any initial influence would have lasted for long. Cawdrey took most of his words from Edmund Coote (The English schoolemaister, 1596), who had in turn drawn on a list of spellings in Mulcaster’s Elementarie (1582). The build-up of these three works is revealing:

Mulcaster Coote Cawdrey

words

mid-point word

8600 1368 2548

iustify fraternitie insult.

Though superficially Cawdrey might be supposed to bear some blame for initiating the unbalanced word-list of the seventeenth-century monolingual English dictionary, this shows that he had done something (at least) to rebalance the even worse list in Coote (the word fraternity comes only one third of the way through modern English dictionaries). Coote’s little 94-page compendium of 1596 was not a formal dictionary, but a basic manual for teaching reading and writing, incorporating a grammar and a vocabulary. His minor but distinctive role in the evolution of English lexicography was to add meanings to the words selected, and the steep decline in coverage of the English vocabulary in his list might lead us to suppose that it was the drudgery of defining which, from the very start, will have lain behind the lexicographer’s tendency to flag as he proceeded through the alphabet.

4. The effect on contents Where a lexicographer (for whatever reason) has produced a work with uneven coverage through the alphabet, the treatment of the vocabulary in the latter part of it may be affected in various ways.

4.1. Fewer entries In Cawdrey (1604) nearly all words (three-quarters of them anyway) have one-line entries, often with one-word definitions: boate, ship braule, wrangle brachygraphie, (g) short writing.

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Much the same can be said of Coles (1676). In such compactly ordered dictionaries a scaling-down of size in the latter part means simply that the user is given more words at first, and fewer later on.

4.2. Shorter entries With Bullokar (1616), the second compiler, the effect is different: not more entries at the beginning, but longer ones. In his much more extensive (but also much less disciplined) work Bullokar gives us the usual one-liners (“Grith. Agreement” and “Gruell. Potage”) but these stand alongside a number of grossly expanded entries such as griffine, “A strange Bird in India, with foure feete armed with cruell clawes, being from the breast upward fashioned like an Eagle, but of purple colour …” (running to 27 lines of text), or divination, which has three whole pages. Such encyclopaedic entries occur far more often, however, near the beginning of the book, and this probably contributes to the increasing density of words per page towards the end: under the letter T, for instance, the compiler averages 20 percent more than he had done under B (for B, 14.5 entries; for T, 18 entries per page). Another early work which packs in more entries at the end is Kersey’s revision of Phillips (1706), with twelve per cent more words per page at W than at A. A similar effect may be observed in Johnson’s Dictionary. Anne McDermott has noted that entries there with encyclopaedic qualities “run throughout the Dictionary but are particularly prevalent at the beginning of the alphabet,” adding that this may be because he “had not yet worked out just what the principles of his lexicon were going to be” (McDermott 2005, 176).

4.3. Omission of secondary information In the 150 years from the bare definitions in Cawdrey to the detailed lemmata of Bailey and Martin the English dictionary compilers greatly expanded the range of information provided on the words entered. But a number of works are noticeably inconsistent in carrying through initial intentions. Cockeram (1623) for instance, promised his readers to mark obsolete words such a benison, blithe, eld or howgates. He failed to do so in the first edition, and when they appear in the second (1626) nearly half of them are under A and B, and none of them beyond the letter I (Kerling 1979, 79–81). Similarly in Phillips’s New world of English words (1658), there is cautionary usage marking with a dagger for non-standard words—with 19 under the letter A, and a total of 78 by M, but only 15 after that (Osselton 1958, 19–24). Such secondary details will of course have had little effect upon the physical build-up

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of the dictionaries concerned, but they provide further incidental evidence of flagging interest on the part of the compiler.

4.4. Longer entries. The dictionary by J.K. (1702) is the most striking exception among those listed in the table given above, and it reveals a pattern which is exactly the reverse of the one in Bullokar. The compiler’s initial emphasis is upon simple, brief explanation: “a Short and Clear exposition of Difficult Words and Terms of Art” is offered and “the most useful Terms in all Faculties are briefly explain’d” (title-page; “Preface” sig. A2r; italics added). Typical short entries are “Apposite, or pat”; “a Conjunction, or joyning together”; “Continuance, or lastingness”; “To grunt, like a hog”). But these become less the norm as he progresses through the dictionary. More synonyms tend to be given (“Vicious, given to vice, depraved, corrupt, lewd, restive, &c.”), and even the definitions of some of the everyday words are at times inflated—near the start of the dictionary the noun brook is simply “rivulet” but later on under the letter R, river has a seven-line entry, “a great quantity of water, continually running in a channel from its spring-head, which is either a fountain or a lake, till it falls into the Sea.” In the twenty-eight pages for the letters A and B only two entries (advent and appropriation) run to six lines of print, whereas in the seventeen pages of T there are more than forty, including Tantalus (fourteen lines), tarantula (ten), tobacco (nine), tragedy (twelve) and tropicks (sixteen). The book then ends with a fine flourish, with zodiack and zones respectively twentynine and eighty-five lines on the last page.

5. Shifts in compiling technique Since in these early years the very shape of the monolingual English dictionary was still in the make, it is perhaps not surprising that some compilers should have had second thoughts, changing the balance of entries and finding new and better ways of dealing with their words as they went along. If (as we have seen) Bullokar puts in fewer lengthy entries at the end than at the beginning, is this because he simply wearied of the task, or could it be that he knowingly scaled them down, seeing that they were bulking too large in so small a work? The phenomenon here called alphabet fatigue may at times mask a purposeful shift in the compiler’s intention. This may best be illustrated from the least well-known of the Bailey dictionaries, the so-called Volume II, published in 1727. The second half of this, called An orthographical dictionary, with about 29,000 entries, is in fact what we should now call a bilingualized learner’s dictionary, intended for native

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learners, with English definitions, but also with French and Latin equivalents for the benefit of foreign learners: To A'SK, to inquire, faire une question, F. interrogare, L. AU'TUMN, the Season of the Year when ripe Fruits are gathered, automne, F., autumnus, L. .

But Bailey does not go through with the task he sets himself. To start with, nearly all the words entered are given English definitions (as with ask and autumn above), but as he proceeds through the alphabet these become fewer and fewer:

A B C D E F G H

page beginning

no of entries

English definitions

%

accessory barter careless deep embarrass ferret gliding haunting

33 64 63 60 67 77 78 67

31 54 33 44 32 25 17 1

94 84 52 73 47 32 22 1

This is based on a simple count on the fifth page under each of the letters A to H. There is some fluctuation later in the alphabet: the letter P is for instance very low in definitions, and R has nearly 70 percent. But the pattern of diminishing attention could hardly be clearer, and under W almost any page will have the barest sprinkling of items with English definitions. However, it is noticeable that in the later part of his dictionary those words which are given definitions are either unusual or archaic ones (A waste-good, a spendthrift; werish, insipid), or else they are homographs which need to be distinguished from each other (To wax, to do over with wax; To wax, to grow or increase, etc.). It seems therefore reasonable to assume that the compiler slowly came to realize while he was on the job that most of the definitions in such an elementary book are simply not needed for the native user (who will mainly look words up for the spelling), and that the foreign learner will derive the meaning from the French or the Latin anyway. Leaving out the definitions will certainly have lightened his lexicographical labours, and it enables him to put more words in: 33 per page at A, and 78 per page at the letter G. Alphabet fatigue here (if we may call it that) is then not

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mere laziness, but rather a growing perception of user-need. This is a lexicographer working out his methodology as he goes along. A further striking instance of structural changes which led to meaningful economies is to be found in Johnson. We have already noted above that he scales down his encyclopaedic entries towards the end of the alphabet, a stage at which “he was contracting everything” (DeMaria 1986, 63). In the case of hyphenated compound words it can be shown that the contraction was achieved not by simple omission of material but by methodological change (Osselton 2005). In the early part of the alphabet, compounds such as half-blood, half-way and half-witted are generally treated as normal words, with full entries in their proper alphabetical place, complete with definition and appropriate quotations. But a different pattern prevails in later entries: from the letter M onwards, similar groups of compounds with a common first element (such as self-charity, self-conceited, self-confiding) are commonly presented merely in a continuous list of quotations arranged either in alphabetical or in historical order, and without further apparatus. This structural change saves space: the 16 entries for the compound words from heart-burned to heart-swelling occupy a whole column of print, but later on in the Dictionary (e.g. from well-hammer’d to well-wrought) we find that up to thirty or more compound words can be accommodated in a single column. We cannot know whether the change was made through sheer weariness at defining what were often self-evident terms (“Hell-black, as black as hell”) or as a conscious refinement in lexicographical technique; but the alternative and more compact treatment of compound words which emerges in the latter part of Johnson’s Dictionary has proved useful to later lexicographers.

6. Conclusion Through the increasing availability of early dictionaries of English in searchable (and easily countable) electronic versions it will no doubt become easier in future to detect and analyse patterns of alphabetic deviation from compiler to compiler. But even on a general inspection of the works from Cawdrey down to Benjamin Martin the general phenomenon of alphabet fatigue is clear enough. Historians of lexicography cannot safely assume that the contents at the end of these works will match what is found at the beginning. Various reasons for the phenomenon may be adduced. But against the obvious and purely negative effect of alphabet fatigueʊa regrettable skimping of the vocabulary in later lettersʊwe must set the spur which it may at times have given to innovation in lexicographical method: relieving the drudgery by introducing (even in mid-stream) new ways of presenting the material which served very properly to make the dictionary shorter.

CHAPTER SEVEN BLANCARDUS’ LEXICON MEDICUM IN HARRIS’S LEXICON TECHNICUM: A LEXICOGRAPHIC AND LEXICOLOGICAL STUDY ELISABETTA LONATI 1. Introduction John Harris’s Lexicon technicum (from now on LT) is considered the first English encyclopaedia, conceived as a dictionary of arts and sciences, “explaining not only the Terms of Art, but the Arts Themselves” (Harris 1704, title page). Its author became secretary and vice-president of the Royal Society; his most important works are concerned with geometry, trigonometry, astronomy, and navigation (for him, see Stewart 2004). LT was meant as a helpful reference work to all those educated and curious readers who wished to be informed about new scientific discoveries, the mechanical arts, and, in particular, those fields of knowledge which investigate the natural world and its multifarious aspects (for a fuller account, see Bradshaw 1981b). Harris wrote in his preface that The best Account I can give of the following Work, will be to lay before you in a short View what it contains, wherein it differs from other Books which may seem to be of the same Nature, and from whence I have collected the Substance of it. That which I have aimed at, is to make it a Dictionary not only of bare Words but Things; and that the Reader may not only find here an Explication of the Technical Words, or the Terms of Art made use of in all the Liberal Sciences, and such as border nearly upon them, but also those Arts themselves; and especially such, and such Parts of them as are most Useful and Advantagious to Mankind. (Harris 1704, sig. a2r)

Among the branches of science included in it, medicine and medical terminology—along with physiology, anatomy, and surgery—are well

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represented, and this is one of the reasons why it is interesting to focus on this aspect of its scientific language, but what is most interesting—and the actual starting point of this study—is the fact that Harris abundantly exploited an earlier work to compile his own medical entries. This was the Lexicon medicum (1679) of one of the most important Dutch physicians, Stephanus Blancardus.1 It was published in English translation as A physical dictionary in 1684 (from now on PD). Given this context, at least two points seem to be relevant for the discussion to follow: firstly, the way Harris deals with medical terminology in his work and secondly, the relationship between his medical terminology and one of his declared and most important sources, namely Blancardus’ PD. By the systematic comparison of Harris’s and Blancardus’ “lexicon medicum,” the lexicographic and lexicological features of Harris’s medical entries can be analyzed. PD is one of the numerous medical publications which were issued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and which testify to a widespread interest in this domain. Unprecedented discoveries in medicine and related fields (such as anatomy, surgery, pharmacy, and chemistry) led to the production of treatises and reference works addressed to a specialized audience but also to the inclusion of specialized terminology in more general reference works. In this respect, it is to be noted that the interest in medical language is not confined to LT but is a common feature of other eighteenth-century English encyclopaedias. These presented the material at different levels. Works such as Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728) and the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–1771), like LT, addressed the educated reader (Bradshaw 1981a, Kafker 1994). John Barrow’s New and universal dictionary of arts and sciences (1751), William Owen’s New and complete dictionary of arts and sciences (1754–1755), and Temple Croker’s Complete dictionary of arts and sciences (1764–1766) tried to equal the success of the Cyclopedia, but did not capture its market (Kafker 1994). Dyche and Pardon’s New general English dictionary (1735) manifests a different level of scientific and linguistic complexity, being a general dictionary whose aim was to popularize scientific and technical knowledge. It was described on its title page as “peculiarly calculated for the Use and Improvement of such as are unacquainted with the Learned Languages,” and Lael Bradshaw has observed that it “would appeal to laymen [who] would appreciate the fact that most scientific terms are briefly described in non-scientific, non-technical language” (Bradshaw 1981c, 159). 1

Steven Blankaart (1650–1702); the name was latinized to Blancardus, hence the forms Blancard, printed in the title-page of the English translation of his Lexicon medicum, and Blanchard, used by Harris in the Lexicon technicum.

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The title-page of the 1684 English edition of PD declares that the aim of the compilation is to provide an accurate explanation of all those terms “relating either to Anatomy, Chirurgery, Pharmacy or Chymistry” and its preface highlights that the dictionary is comprehensive, not omitting “any one useful term in the whole art of Physick” and explaining that with the dictionary’s help “the terms (... which all, or the most part of Mankind has daily occasion to use) … may give a rational account of their discourse” (Blancardus 1684, sigs A3v– 4r). Hence, while being confined to a selected field—or fields—of knowledge, it does not seem to be restricted to a specialized readership or, at least, the addressee is not clearly defined: “the most part of Mankind” is an ambitious, as well as an ambiguous, target audience. The author of the preface simply states that the aim of PD is to spread and explain medical terminology and techniques and, as a consequence, to be useful to mankind. Things change in the subsequent editions of PD, all of them published before LT and cited by Harris himself in his preface: The Chymical and Physical Dictionaries of Johnson, Castellus and Blanchard, have a great many Words and Terms that are not to be met with elsewhere: And the last hath had four Editions in our own Language; but tho’ many things are well enough done in him, yet some can hardly be said to be so; so that in many Places I have been obliged to put his Name to what my Amanuensis or Assistant transcribed from him, lest the Reader shou’d mistake it for my own Words. (Harris 1704, sig. a2v)

Here, Blancardus is mentioned as one of the major sources for Harris’s “lexicon medicum,” and he is often directly referred to as the authority for the information given in LT’s entries. Harris declares his source but he does not clarify which among the four editions already published has been used in LT, even though he is entirely reliable about their number. Actually, after the first English edition of 1684 (PD1), three further editions were issued in 1693, 1697 and 1702 respectively (from now on PD2, PD3, PD4). All of them are published as The physical dictionary and their title-pages include detailed information about their contents: “The Terms of Anatomy, the Names and Causes of Diseases, Chyrurgical Instruments and their Use; are accurately Describ’d,” and so on. The preface of PD2, reprinted in PD3 and PD4, accurately defines its audience: no longer an indefinite or general addressee but a reader concerned with “all things us’d in the Commonwealth of Physick” and potentially interested in a range of special subjects. Here Physicians may find the various Names of Diseases and their Causes, the Terms of Anatomy and the Vertues of Drugs, and Medicinal Plants. Surgeons may learn the Name of Ulcers and their Causes, the Names of their Instruments and their Use. Apothecaries may here find the various Forms of Medicines, and

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It is clear that PD is a specialized work—indeed a “Treatise”—which “may be modestly affirm’d to be the most Compleat Medicinal Dictionary now extant” (ibid.).

2. The word-list and the single entries In order to carry out the present analysis, that is the study of LT’s medical terminology by close comparison with PD and the presentation of Harris’s lexicographic techniques, each of the above mentioned editions of PD was taken into consideration. By medical terminology I mean those few terms labelled by Harris as belonging to medicine, pharmacy, and surgery or, if not labelled, clearly referring to these domains, thus excluding such fields as anatomy and chemistry. The analysis will demonstrate the interrelation between these works and, in particular, how and how far Blancardus’ Lexicon medicum—or, better, Blancardus’ PD1234—was exploited by Harris for his own encyclopaedia: that is, the compiler’s adaptations, transcriptions, abbreviations, or reductions of the original entries in the economy of his own work. Firstly, a word list of medical headwords was drawn up for LT following a thorough scrutiny of the letters A, H, I/J, and P: the beginning, the middle and the end of Harris’s encyclopaedia. There are 2,338 headwords in these alphabetical ranges, of which 333 are strictly medical, and another 270 or so anatomical. Secondly, on the basis of this selection, the corresponding word list in PD1234 was also established: there are 860 headwords in this range in PD1, 1,184 in PD23, and 1,844 in PD4. A total of 269 headwords are shared by LT and at least one edition of PD, because certain terms included in LT are not included in PD1234, and vice versa. However, it is to be highlighted that more than a half of Harris’s word list—that is 174 headwords—comes from PD1234, and that most of them are simply transcribed in LT without any alteration. Before discussing LT entries in detail, it is worth pointing out that the features shared by LT and PD1 suggest a stronger connection between these two works than between LT and PD234. In fact, from a structural point of view, the entries in LT mirror those in PD1 but differ from those of PD234: the common sequence is HEADWORD + IS/ARE + DEFINITION, with the headword used as subject of the following definition. The verb form establishes an identity between the term/s and its/their definition, whereas in the post-1684 versions the headword simply performs the function of a title: in other words, LT and PD1

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generally use a “subject-verb” structure whereas in PD234 a “topic-comment” structure is preferred and significantly exploited.2 Although a boundary can be drawn up on a structural basis between two groups of works (PD1 and PD234) and their influence on LT, it is difficult—if not impossible—to state which of the post-1684 editions were used by Harris because there is no difference between their entries: PD2 and PD3 are identical in the number of entries, form, and contents, the only difference being the titlepage, and although PD4 has 660 headwords more than the two previous editions in the alphabetical ranges under discussion, what is common to all of them perfectly corresponds in the three versions.

2.1. Simple transcription of PD in LT Some entries, such as anthrax and parachynanche, were simply borrowed by Harris from PD with only very minor changes in punctuation or typography, or accidental changes such as the misreading “separated” for “suppurated” s.v. anthrax below. LT ANTHRAX, Carbo, Pruna, or Carbunculus, is defined to be a Tumour that arises in several places, surrounded with hot, fiery and most sharp Pimples, accompanied with acute Pains, but without ever being separated; and when it spreads it self farther, it burns the flesh, throws off lobes of it when it is rotten, and leaves an Ulcer behind it, as if it had been burnt in with an Iron. Blanchard. PARACHYNANCHE, is an Inflammation with a continual Fever and difficulty of Breathing excited in

PD1 (variants from PD234 in square brackets) Anthrax, Carbo, Pruna, or Carbunculus, is defined to be a Tumor that arises in several places, surrounded with hot fiery and most sharp Pimples, accompanied with acute Pain, but without ever being suppurated; and when it spreads it self farther, it burns the Flesh, throws off lobes of it when it is rotten, and leaves an Ulcer behind it, as if it had been burnt in with an Iron. Parachynanche is an Inflammation with a continual Feaver [Parachynanche, an Inflammation* with a continual Fever] and difficulty of Breathing, excited in

2 See, for example, in the following sections, anastomosis, aphthae, helminthagogues / helminthagoga, parachynanche, pathology, pleuritis, and anasarcha.

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the outward Muscles of the Larynx.

the outward Muscles of the Larynx.

[next entry cites Blanchard]

*In PD4: Inflamation

Table 7-1: LT’s transcription of the PD entries anthrax and parachynanche

2.2. Reworking of the source text: abbreviations and cuts Although Harris’s general policy is the transcription of Blancardus’ entries as such, he does not always limit himself to this and he sometimes reworks the available material to be exploited in LT. In the following examples Harris adapts the three entries from the source to fit his lexicographical needs. Anastomosis is shorter in LT than it is in PD1234; the second half of the entry-source has been simply left out. Because of the omission, it is not possible here—if indeed it is possible at all—to determine the edition actually used (though the headword spelling might indicate PD23 as a source): LT

PD1 (variants from PD234 in square brackets) ANASTOMOSIS, Anastomasis is an Effluxion is an effluxion [PD23: Anastomosis, an effluxion; PD4: Anastamosis, an effluxion] of the Blood, the Lympha or Chyle, of the Blood, the Lympha or Chyle, at the meeting of Vessels that close at the meeting of Vessels that close not narrowly: It is also taken for the not narrowly. It is also taken for the mutual opening of Veins and Arteries mutual opening of Veins and Arteries into one another. into one another, as some long ago dream’t, though they were awake; for this were to offer [PD234 as some long agoe falsely imagin’d; for this were to offer] violence to the Laws of Circulation: yet it is not impossible neither, since Veins open into Veins, and Arteries into Arteries; as is plain in the Spermatick Vessels; the Plexus Choroides, rete mirabile, &c. Table 7-2: LT’s abbreviation of the PD entry anastomasis

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In the case of Aphthae, the LT and PD234 versions are shorter than PD1’s: the middle section starting from “In the new-born Children” up to “There is not the same danger in Men and Women,” is completely omitted. LT APHTHAE, are Wheals, Ulcers or Pimples about the Internal Parts of the Mouth; as also about the Ventricle and Guts, which when they come to be ripe, fall off by piece-meal, and are often accompanied with a Fever in those of riper Years. Infants are much subject to the Aphthae,

they begin in the Gums, and by degrees spread over the whole Palate and Mouth; if they seize the Epiglottis and the upper parts of the Throat, the Child seldom recovers. These are the Aphthae of Celsus.

PD1 (variants from PD234 in square brackets) Aphthae are Wheals [Aphthae, Wheals] or Pimples about the Internal parts of the Mouth; as also about the Ventricle and Guts, which when they come to be ripe,, fall off by piece-meal, and are often accompanied with a Fever in those of riper Years. [a Fever: A Distemper to which Infants are very Obnoxious.] In the new-born Children, I believe it arises from some Impurities which the Mass of Blood contracts in the Mothers Womb; for the Blood for want of Eventilation there, being more impure, presently after the birth of the Foetus begins to flourish and refine. Celsus’s Aphthae are otherwise described; but, says He, There are extream dangerous Ulcers in Children, which the Greeks call ǯǹijșĮȢ, for they often kill them. There is not the same danger in Men and Women.* These Ulcers begin in the Gums, then by little and little spread over the Palate and the whole Mouth; and then at last descend to the Epiglottis, or cover of the Wind pipe, and the upper part of the Throat, which being once Infected, the Child hardly recovers. *This section, “In the new-born…Men and Women” is omitted from PD234.

Table 7-3: LT’s and PD234’s abridgements of the PD1 entry aphthae

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The compilers of LT and PD234 link the two paragraphs of their entries with expressions which summarize, in a sense, what is a long and detailed digression in PD1. However, they deal with the shortening in different ways: the first and last paragraphs perfectly overlap in PD1234, whereas they are partially rephrased and reorganized in LT. Harris makes two significant additions. Firstly, he places “Ulcers” in the first paragraph between “Wheals” and “Pimples,” thus splitting the couple of equivalents for aphthae and providing a third one; the term “Ulcers” anticipates what in PD1234 is the subject of the concluding paragraph, which in LT is substituted by “they.” Secondly, Harris links the two core sections of his entry with the clause “Infants are much subject to the Aphthae,” which introduces the last paragraph and, simultaneously, establishes a strong connection between the two conceptual nuclei. It is not clear whether Harris either cut and adapted the digression from PD1 himself or modified the post-1684 linking sentence “A Distemper to which Infants are very Obnoxious.” Perhaps he exploited both versions; but the sequence “a Fever in those of riper Years,” reproduced in LT from PD1, along with the completely new expression “These are the Aphthæ of Celsus,” which closes the LT entry and summarizes what PD1 states in the digression, seems to suggest that the PD1 version was the base text for his entry, duly abbreviated and reorganized by cohesive strategies. The LT entry apoplexy is shorter than its source. Since the entries in PD1234 perfectly overlap, except for the phrase “shaken, tossed, and pricked” in PD1 as opposed to “shaken, pull’d, and prick’d” in PD234, it can safely be argued that Harris’s entry is taken from PD1 and, as under anastomosis, a whole section of the text is simply left out. The one point which suggests that Harris may also have consulted PD234 in writing his entry is the identification of attonitus and stupor as two different synonyms (as PD234 punctuate), rather than as a single lexical item (as PD1 punctuates). LT

PD1 (variants from PD234 in square brackets) APOPLEXY, Attonitus, Stupor, Apoplexia, Attonitus stupor, [Attonitus, stupor,] Sideratio, and Morbus attonitus, is a Sideratio, and Morbus attonitus, is a profound Sleep, wherein the Patient profound Sleep, wherein the Patient being either vehemently shaken, tossed, being vehemently shaken, tossed, and pricked, or pricked, [shaken, pull’d and prick’d,] yet perceives nothing, nor affords any yet perceives nothing, nor affords any sign of Action; accompanied with a sign of Action; accompanied with a difficulty of Respiration for the most difficulty of Respiration for the most

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part, and sometimes with none at all. Blanchard.

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part, and sometimes with none at all: it arises [rises] frequently from viscous Blood, which obstructs the least Pores of the Brain: or from Blood Extravasated about the Basis of the Brain, which oppresses and straitens the Carotidal Arteries, or the Brain.

Table 7-4: LT’s abridgement of the PD1 entry apoplexy

2.3. Reworking of the source text: rephrasing and popularizing If most terms and their respective entries are simply transferred from a text to another and others undergo reductions and cuts, a group of entries, among which are helminthagogues, pleuritis, and pathology, show Harris’s partially different approach compared to his source. Helminthagogues, or helminthicks counts as a single entry in LT; it is absent from PD1 and is divided in two distinct entries in PD234. In this case, the only possible source is a post-1684 version, from which Harris duly quotes. He uses helminthicks as an equivalent of his headword and copies the definition given in PD234 under helminthagoga. Even though Blancardus is quoted as the only source for the whole entry, the form of words in the second half of the entry is original—in the sense that it is not taken from PD234—and may be Harris’s own or his borrowing from some other source. However, what is added is a very simple explanation and this may suggest that Harris himself is its author. LT HELMINTHAGOGUES, or Helminthicks, are Medicines that expel Worms,

PD234 (not in PD1) Helminthagoga, Medicines that expel Worms. Helminthica, Medicines that kill Worms.

or bring ’em away by Stool. Blanchard. Table 7-5: LT’s merging of, and addition to, the PD234 entries helminthagoga and helminthica The LT entries pleuritis and pathology are longer than the PD1234 versions and they end with a sort of comment whose author—like that of the rephrasing under helminthagogues—it is impossible to determine. However, under pleuritis the closing textual expansion may suggest the entry pleuritis notha in PD1234

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as a source. Apart from the final comment, pleuritis mirrors PD1234, whereas the phrase “teacheth … preternatural Constitution” s.v. pathology, clearly suggests the version used, since LT and PD1 share it in contrast to PD234’s “shews…diseas’d Constitution.” LT PLEURITIS, a Pleurisie, is an Inflammation of the Membrane Pleura, and the Intercostal Muscles, attended with a continued Fever, and Stitches in the Side, Difficulty of Breathing, and sometimes Spitting of Blood; and it’s either a true Pleurisie, this which we have described, or a Bastard Pleurisie, whose Symptomes are not so violent, and in some things different from the former. PATHOLOGY, is a Part of Physick that teacheth us the preternatural Constitution of a Man’s Body,

PD1 (variants from PD234 in square brackets) Pleuritis a Pleurisy, is a Inflammation [Pleuritis, a Pleurisie, an Inflammation] of the Membrane Pleura, and the intercostal Muscles, attended with a continual Fever and Stitches in the Side, difficulty of Breathing, and sometimes spitting Blood, and it’s either a true Pleurisy [Pleurisie], this which we have described, or a bastard Pleurisy [Pleurisie]. Pleuritis Notha a bastard Pleurisy, that differs in some things from the other. Pathologia is a part [Pathologia, that part] of Physick that teacheth us [which shews] the preternatural Constitution of a Man’s Body [diseas’d Consitution of the Body].

so as thereby to discover the Nature and Causes of Diseases. Table 7-6: LT’s additions to PD1234’s entry pleuritis and PD1’s entry pathology. In the case of the entries for anasarcha, LT mirrors PD1, whereas PD234 have a shorter version.

Blancardus' Lexicon Medicum in Harris's Lexicon Technicum

LT ANASARCHA, is a white, soft, yielding Tumour of the whole outward Body, or of some of its parts, which dents in by compressing the Flesh; it is caused by the Blood upon a double account; first, When it doth not rightly sanguify or assimilate the Chyle; and again, when it is not rightly accended in the Lungs; the Blood thus perverted, pours forth the Serum at the Extremities of the Arteries in greater quantities than it can receive and reduce by the Veins and Lympheducts, or expell by the Veins and Pores, and other passages that send it forth. If the Humours be too viscous it is called Leucophlegmatia. Blanchard.

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PD1 (variants from PD234 in square brackets) Anasarcha is a white, [Anasarcha, a white] soft, yielding tumor of the whole outward body, or of some of its parts, which dints in by compressing the flesh; *it is caused by the blood upon a double account; first, when it does not rightly sanguifie, or assimilate the Chyle; and again, when it is not rightly accended in the Lungs. The blood thus perverted, pours forth the Serum at the extremities of the Arteries in greater quantity than it can receive and reduce by the Veins and Lympheducts, or expel by the Veins and Pores, and other passages that send it forth. If the humours be too viscous, it is called Leucophlegmatia. [*It is caused by some Obstruction in the Lymphatick Vessels, when the Lympha is too Thick and the Blood Viscid. But if the Humours are very Clammy and Viscid, it is called Leucophlegmatia.]

Table 7-7: LT agrees with PD1 against PD234 in giving the long version of an entry. Here, Harris neither abridges, as he does under aphthae, nor adds further explanations and comments to the text, as he does under helminthagogues, pleuritis, and pathology, but retains a complex exposition, which is, however, no longer reproduced in the post-1684 versions, where it might have been expected, given the specialized nature of the works. Notwithstanding the fact that the widespread tendency is to transfer entry text from PD1234 to LT, and that changes which are made tend to be slight, what can be deduced from the above examples is that these changes are not meaningless. Such entries as helminthagogues could not have existed in LT if different versions of PD had not been available to Harris. Some entries such as aphthae, apoplexy, pathology, and anasarcha suggest that Harris mostly used

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PD1 but that he also exploited at least one—or more—of the post-1684 editions. Furthermore, under the above-mentioned entries—except for anasarcha— Harris’s rephrasing and comments are a clear example of scientific popularizing: in other words, the extension or shortening of the source-text in order to render its scientific and specialized contents suitable for a nonspecialized reader.

2.4. Quotation of the source Despite the fact that Harris declares in his preface that he has been extremely careful to identify the sources of the material he uses “lest the Reader shou’d mistake it for [his] own,” he is not at all systematic in this practice. Even the entry medicine, which, in a sense, is the frame introducing the whole word list, was taken and transcribed with slight formal expansions in LT without any reference to the source: LT (variants from PD1234 in square brackets) MEDICINE, or as ’tis commonly called Physick, is an Art [Medicina, Physick, (is) an Art] assistant to Nature, and designed for the preserving of Health in Humane Bodies [and preserving Health in Human Bodies], as much as is possible, by the Use of [by] convenient Remedies. Senertus and others, divide [rightly divide] it into five parts. 1. Physiologia, which treats of an Human Constitution, as it is sound and well; to which belongs Anatomy too. 2. Pathologia, which treats of the Preternatural Constitution of our Bodies. 3. Semiotica, which treats of the Signs of Health and Diseases. 4. Hygieina, which delivers Rules for [of] the Regimen to be observed in the Preservation of Health. 5. Therapeutica, which teaches the management of Diet; and comprehends Chyrurgery, and the Art of Medicine, properly so called. [which teaches Diet, Chyrurgery, and Medicine.] The general Division of Physick is only into two Parts; the Theory and the Practick: An accurate Skill in both which, are necessary to make a Man a good Physician. [Practic(e); the Subject of Physick is human Body, as curable; and its end and design Health. Hippocrates calls it a long Art, and Paracelsus a short one; and certain Arabians a little one, but in reality it is a long, a great, and noble Art.] Table 7-8: LT reworks PD1234’s entry medicina without acknowledgement

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This attitude is fairly common throughout LT: in fact, about forty per cent of the entries analyzed clearly originate in PD, although no source is acknowledged. Parachynanche, for example, while being a literal copy of the source, makes no reference to PD; anastomosis, aphthae, and apoplexy are clearly derived from PD but the source text is only declared s.v. apoplexy; the source of pleuritis and pathology likewise goes unmentioned. This is not only a matter of Harris’s attitude to PD, for those medical entries whose contents derive from other works are also often printed without acknowledgement of their sources.

3. A lexicological analysis What has been dealt with so far concerns the lexicographical side of the present analysis, i.e. how Harris exploited one of his sources to compile his entries. It seems now relevant to discuss at least a few aspects of Harris’s encyclopaedia from a lexicological point of view, that is to say (1) the process of anglicization; (2) the use of lexical variants; (3) the reintroduction of Latinate terms in LT where PD uses English.

3.1. The process of anglicization The tendency to anglicize Latin headwords may be observed in both those terms borrowed from PD and those belonging to other sources (these are sketchily referenced; the names given by Harris include Cowper, Keil, Tyson, Malpighius, Lemery, Purcell and Willis). What is more, this process of anglicization mostly affects the word list in letter A (among those analyzed and common to LT and PD), whereas the approach in H, I/J and P seems more conservative or convenient: possibly, the compiler-lexicographer tries to ease his own task. In actual fact, the average numbers of anglicized terms decreases from fifty per cent to ten per cent. The following grid exemplifies what has just been said: Anglicized forms vs. Latinate forms in the word list common to LT and PD (LT’s entries derived either from PD or other sources: 269 terms) A 41 terms out of 85 (~50%) H 4 terms out of 60 (~8%) I/J 3 terms out of 19 (~12%) P 16 terms out of 105 (~7%)

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Anglicized forms vs. Latinate forms in the word list common to LT and PD (LT’s entries actually taken from PD: 174 terms) A 10 terms out of 24 (~50%) H 4 terms out of 56 (~8%) I/J 3 terms out of 14 (~20%) P 8 terms out of 80 (~10%) Table 7-9: Proportion of anglicized to Latinate headwords in different alphabetical ranges of LT The latter group of data, that is the set of terms actually taken from PD, also emphasizes how, as Harris’s work progresses, the number of medical terms from Blancardus’ book grows: a fact that might have been determined by his not having enough time or the possibility to exploit ready material from a reliable source. It is difficult to single out the compiler’s principle implicit in his choices and practice, not least because the four English editions of PD keep the original headwords in Latin or Greek, translating only the definition text. The following pairs of terms taken from LT and PD1234 respectively show Harris anglicizing PD headwords: alopecy / alopecia, analepticks / analeptica, aneurism / aneurisma, anorexy / anorexia, antidote / antidotum, helminthagogues / helminthagoga, hidrotick medicines / hidrotica, hypnoticks / hypnotica, idiopathy / idiopathia, pachuntick medicines / pachuntica, palliation of a disease / palliatio, Paracelsistick medicines / Paracelsistica med., pectorals / pectoralia, etc. In LT, the anglicization usually consists of a single word but in the case of Latin plural forms the English version may be a phrase; here, as before, no systematic approach can be discerned. In any case, it is not clear whether Harris anglicized the terms himself or whether he used forms that were already present in the language. The Oxford English Dictionary testifies that most word-forms were already used in specialized medical literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, only some being documented for the first time in English lexicography before Harris – such as alopecy, listed in Blount’s Glossographia of 1656 and identified as a rare term, “An adaptation of ALOPECIA, in Blount Glossogr. 1656, and in mod. Dicts.” As far as the sample under scrutiny here is concerned, it is interesting to highlight that the occurrences of helminthagogues (as well as its equivalent helminthicks) and paracelsistick medicines are recorded for the first time in Harris’s LT, as is the spelling of pachuntick medicines (pachyntic is attested in 1659). Once more, it cannot be stated with certainty whether Harris adapted the variant spellings himself or whether these terms were already in use and, hence, simply transcribed in his LT.

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3.2 The use of multiple headwords A number of entries in LT have multiple headwords, as in the following table: Headwords Anthrax, Carbo, Pruna, or Carbunculus Apoplexy, Attonitus, Stupor, Sideratio, attonitus

Notes all directly from PD and Morbus first item translated; synonyms directly from PD Parastatae. See Epididymis. Epididymida added; Epididymis, or Epididymida, or Paristata, in Latine, otherwise directly Supergeminalis from PD Helminthagogues, or Helminthicks translated from two distinct headwords in PD234 Hypoglossis, or Ranula directly from PD Impetigo Celsi, … Lepra Graecorum directly from PD Palliation of a Disease, or a Palliative Cure translated from PD Paracentesis, or Punctio, a Perforation directly from PD Pleuritis, or Pleurisie directly from PD Ptarmica, or Sternutatoria directly from PD Pyrotica, or Urentia directly from PD Table 7-10: Multiple headwords in LT and their sources These multiple headwords may be lists of Latin or of English lexical items. Some of these lists mix Latin and English (e.g. those beginning apoplexy and paracentesis above, and aphthae in table 7-3), but this rarely happens. More often than not, Harris retains the forms belonging to the source except when he anglicizes the first headword, in which case he also anglicizes those which follow, e.g. helminthagogues, or helminthicks and palliation of a disease, or a palliative cure.

3.3. Reintroduction of Latinate forms in LT Harris sometimes restores Latinate words in his definition or explanation where the translator of Blancardus’ Lexicon medicum uses English nonspecialized words already established in the language.

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Headword

Definition text in PD and LT

Paracentesis

“near the white Seam in the Abdomen” PD1234

“near the Linea Alba in the Abdomen” LT Paraphrenitis “through the Inflam(m)ation of the Midriff … and thence the Midriff” PD1234 “through the Inflamation of the Diaphragm … and thence the Midriff” LT Icterus “weakness, obstruction, or Schirres of the Liver” PD1234 Hydrocele

“Weakness, Obstruction, or a Schirrus of the Liver” LT “outermost Skin of the Cods” PD1234 “outermost Skin of the Scrotum” LT

Table 7-11: Latinate forms substituted by Harris for the English of PD A special case here is the substitution of schirrus for the inaccurate schirres s.v. icterus: the Greek etymon is ıțȓȡȡȠȢ, not, as the translator of PD must have imagined, *ıȤȓȡȡȘȢ. In the other cases, the terminology rejected by Harris does not come from prestigious classical languages but from the core vocabulary of English. As in the previous examples, it seems there is no strictly linguistic reason for such occasional substitutions but there might be—of course—extralinguistic reasons. Actually, Harris seems to amend the text of the anonymous English translator and to emphasize both the linguistic and the cultural authoritativeness of this specific field of knowledge. In other words, the anglicization of the headwords may be allowed but the replacement of technical terms with common vocabulary seems to be unacceptable, even in a dictionary-encyclopaedia such as LT whose target is a non-specialized reader.

4. Concluding remarks The collation carried out in the course of the present analysis confirms a close correlation—both from a lexicographical and a lexicological point of view—between Blancardus’ Physical dictionary and Harris’s Lexicon technicum. PD has a functional aim, that is, to inform and help a specialized reading public of physicians, surgeons, anatomists and apothecaries—maybe also mere practitioners—in carrying out their job. The preface of PD1 emphasizes that the wordlist comprises “the most useful of all the Terms in Anatomy, Pharmacy,

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Chirurgery, and Chymistry,” and “has not omitted any one useful term in the whole art of Physick” (Blancardus 1684, sig. A3v) adding That the Publick-Good has all along been drove at in this Affair, both by the Author and Bookseller, is very apparent, in that it might have made a Book of three times the price, and the matter spun out to a far greater bulk; but in things of this nature, the Buyer’s Interest ought to be, and has been consulted. (ibid., sig. A4r)

The prefaces of post-1684 editions likewise stress “the Usefulness and Necessity of Dictionaries” and “the Usefulness of the present Undertaking” (Blancardus 1693, 1697, 1702 sig. A2r). Hence, if Blancardus’ dictionary works as a short treatise but also as a handbook whose interest (and use) seems to be confined to a relatively small group of people, what still remains to be seen is the purpose of medical terminology in Harris’s LT, in whose preface there is no reference at all to a specialized reading public, but only to an educated—albeit curious and enquiring—“Reader.” The difference between the intended audiences of the two dictionaries does not affect Harris’s lexicographical and lexicological procedure. LT entries are usually transcribed from the source without substantial changes and, where changes are introduced, they are slight adaptations, such as rephrasing. However, such variant readings are meaningful enough to establish the basic text used as a source. As far as reductions are concerned, the general trend is to shorten Blancardus’ entries by simply leaving out what can deviate from the main topic: hence, digressions which would be useless for a non-specialized reader are normally omitted. However, the approach varies from entry to entry: for example, under aphthae the contents were adapted for the aim of LT, whereas under anasarcha a long digression is completely maintained. In other words, sometimes Harris reworks the source text in order to popularize its specialized contents for his technical but non-specialized LT, sometimes he does not select the information given, but simply transfers specialized details from PD to LT. This can be explained partly by some of the obstacles in Harris’s way. It is, firstly, often true that a compiler’s enthusiasm and aim at the beginning of his work come to be restrained by circumstances during the course of the work. Lack of time and editorial pressure play a key role because of the publisher’s need to have the book ready to be sold or delivered to the subscribers of the undertaking. Secondly, anglicizing or translating medical terminology (and indeed other technical terminology) was often found to be difficult. As R. W. McConchie has said of sixteenth-century English writers on medicine,

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Some perceived that certain words might be difficult to understand or to translate, but this was not always seen to be due to the shortcomings of English. The difficulties were also those presented by the terms in the source languages themselves, and in the opacity of the specialist lexicon in whichever language it was to be found. (McConchie 1997, 51)

These considerations may well be relevant to Harris as to his predecessors. A particular difficulty was posed by the authority and tradition established by medical authors whose linguistic medium was still often Latin (or latinized Greek). Moreover, there was no actual need for Harris to translate headwords, as far as medical terminology is concerned. His aim was to define and explain, to make the reader understand the meaning and function of words, that is to say what they represented in the real world: it was not a question of word-form—or not primarily of word-form—in this case, but of content. His encyclopaedia was addressed to a non-specialized reader interested in what was hidden behind the linguistic surface. Last but not least, the ambition to produce a new technical dictionary whose authoritativeness was guaranteed by the best specialized publications of the period—which therefore did not need to be extensively modified—may have suggested his careful attitude towards the translation or anglicization of medical headwords as well as the reintroduction of Latinate words where the translator of PD uses English equivalents. This is what Harris may have either consciously chosen or unconsciously experienced while compiling his own Lexicon technicum or, better, his own “lexicon medicum” in Lexicon technicum.

CHAPTER EIGHT REPORTING EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY VOCABULARY IN THE OED CHARLOTTE BREWER It is universally acknowledged that the OED is an unrivalled and invaluable source of information and erudition on words and their meanings, together with their etymology, historical development, currency, spellings, and pronunciation. Not only does this remarkable dictionary provide a systematic and comprehensive account of lexical items from 1150 to around 1928 (the date the first edition was completed), but it also prints, for each entry, a wealth of quotations evidencing usage. These quotations, amassed over many years from enormous numbers of sources, with tenacious and protracted manual industry now almost unimaginable to us, constitute the raw material on which the semantic analyses and definitions of the lexicographers are based.1 The open display of this evidence on the printed page allows users to scrutinise the quotations for themselves, and thus understand the grounds for the lexicographers’ judgements. It also encourages us to draw conclusions from the selection and presentation of the quotations. But how much do we know about the reasons and circumstances underlying the lexicographers’ choice of quotations, and the conclusions it is therefore legitimate to draw from the selection they print? Now that OED is electronically searchable, it is possible to begin to answer these two questions and to form views on the dictionary’s treatment of different periods and sources in the language. In this paper, I begin by sketching out some of the major issues concerning the role and function of quotations in the OED, and then look in more detail at the OED’s documentation of the eighteenth century.2 1

Several histories of the making of the OED now exist, the fullest continuing to be that of the editor’s granddaughter (Murray 1977). See also Craigie and Onions 1933, and the excellent recent book by Mugglestone (2005). 2 I am most grateful to John Simpson, Chief Editor of OED3, and to John Considine for comments on and corrections to this article and its appendix. All responsibility for the data, views, and judgements they contain remains my own.

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The importance of the quotations and the methods by which they were collected cannot be over-emphasized. Quotations have been called “the heart of the lexicographical process” (Aitken 1971, 9), and certainly the early lexicographers understood that this was the chief element in their dictionary that allowed them to take such great evolutionary steps forward in lexicography. As two of them, W. A. Craigie and C. T. Onions, wrote in 1933, OED’s “basis is a collection of some five million excerpts from English literature of every period,” forming “the only possible foundation for the historical treatment of every word and idiom which is the raison d’être of the work. It is a fact everywhere recognized that the consistent pursuit of this evidence has worked a revolution in the art of lexicography” (Craigie and Onions 1933). The main editor of the first edition, J. A. H. Murray, pointed to the fundamental role of quotations in a dictionary when he described their use in Charles Richardson’s A new dictionary of the English language (1836–7): “Observing how much light was shed on the meaning of words by Johnson’s quotations, [Richardson] was impressed with the notion that, in a dictionary, definitions are unnecessary, that quotations alone are sufficient ... his special notion was quite correct in theory” (J. Murray 1900, 44 [my italics]; for more on Richardson’s dictionary, see Aarsleff 1983, 249–52; Dolezal 2000; Fowler 2004). A number of accounts exist of the ways in which the early OED editors and volunteers gathered the quotations which contributed so crucially to the revolutionary new dictionary. Readers worked through thousands of sources and excerpted quotations from them illustrating how words had been used in varying senses; editors and sub-editors then studied these quotations intensively so as to arrive at an analysis of their historical relationship. The last of these operations was described by Murray to the members of the Philological Society in 1884, in a report which makes clear the importance of the provenance and selection of the quotations concerned: Only those who have made the experiment, know the bewilderment with which editor or sub-editor, after he has apportioned the quotations for such a word as above, against, account, allow, and, as, assize, or at among 20, 30 or 40 groups, and furnished each of these with a provisional definition, spreads them out on a table or on a floor, where he can obtain a general survey of the whole, and spends hour after hour in shifting them about like the pieces on a chess-board, striving to find in the fragmentary evidence of an incomplete historical record, such a sequence of meanings as may form a logical chain of development. (J. Murray 1882–4, 509–10; cf. K. Murray 1977, 298)

Three years later he provided, to quote one of his contemporary successors, the present Director of OED3, “a clear picture of the process of discovering

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meanings in the data” (Silva 2000, 90): “You sort your quotations into bundles on your big table, and think you are getting the word’s pedigree right, when a new sense, or three or four new senses, start up, which upset all your scheme, and you are obliged to begin afresh” (J. Murray 1887, x). As Silva writes, “in practice it is almost invariably in the quotations that the historical lexicographer initially seeks and discerns fine sense-divisions and new senses” (Silva 2000, 89). Murray’s younger colleague, Onions, expatiated on this stage of the analysis in an anonymous contribution to the Oxford University Press’s inhouse magazine of 1928 (part of a longer article written to celebrate the completion of the OED): Careful and repeated reading of these [sc. the quotations, “the raw material of most of the articles in the Dictionary”] brings to [the editor’s] mind definitions of the senses, some well known to him, others unknown or unthought of but for the evidence now furnished him by examples of actual use. At the same time he is continually turning to existing dictionaries—Dr. Johnson, the various editions of Webster, and the most recent supplements—gladly availing himself of any help or hint they offer in the wording of a definition, or in the record of new senses. Full as the recorded material is, he finds that there are uses—especially modern terms and colloquialisms—for which no quotations are forthcoming ... Much of the toil of sifting and collecting fresh material consists in the examination of the Old English and Middle English dictionaries, the glossaries to early texts, and the concordances to the Bible, Shakespeare, and other poets. (Onions 1928, 15)

These remarks make it clear that where “raw material” was perceived to be lacking, editors turned to specific sources to fill in the quotation gaps: Old and Middle English dictionaries (for which resources were then poor), glossaries (such as those provided in Early English Text Society editions, presumably), and concordances to the Bible and to the established canonical poets, these being the only authors for whom concordances, major editions with glossaries, or both were available (e.g. Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and Tennyson). (The question to what extent the editors’ expectations and intuition guided, and perhaps determined, their additional and supplementary findings is a fascinating one which deserves full investigation, such as is not possible here). In two further accounts, the dictionary itself provides information about the quotations and their role; although we may find both descriptions, in their different ways, somewhat cursory given the lexicographers’ own views of their pivotal significance in dictionary-making. In his “General Explanations,” his brief report on the English language and on OED’s editorial practices and printing conventions, published in 1888 as part of the introductory material to the first volume of OED1 and reprinted in the 1933 and 1989 editions of the dictionary, Murray explained that

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Chapter Eight To a great extent the explanations of the meanings, or definitions, have been framed anew upon a study of all the quotations for each word collected for this work, of which those printed form only a small part. ... The quotations illustrate the forms and uses of the word, showing the age of the word generally, and of its various senses particularly; the earliest and, in obsolete words or senses, the latest, known instances of its occurrence being always quoted. ... They are arranged chronologically so as to give about one for each century, though various considerations often render a larger number necessary. ... It is to be distinctly borne in mind that the quotations are not merely examples of the fully developed use of the word or special sense under which they are cited: they have also to illustrate its origin, its gradual separation from allied words or senses, or even, by negative evidence, its non-existence at the given date. It would often have been desirable to annotate the quotations, explaining the purpose for which they are adduced; but the exigencies of space render this impossible, and they are therefore left to speak for themselves. The need to keep the Dictionary within practicable limits has also rendered it necessary to give only a minimum of quotations selected from the material available, and to make those given as brief as possible. (Murray 1888)

A number of features can be pulled out here. First, Murray’s clear enunciation of the principle we have seen stated elsewhere, namely that the quotations are the bedrock of the lexicographical enterprise. Secondly, his point that the quotations actually printed in the OED form only a small proportion of those initially gathered; we may assume that Murray and his editors chose to print the most representative and aptly phrased of the quotations available to them. Related to this point is Murray’s reference in the last two sentences to the extreme pressures on the editors to keep the dictionary to a manageable size, so as to ensure the completion of the project on the one hand and control expenditure on staff, administration and printing on the other. Undoubtedly this was always an important constraint on the generosity with which senses could be illustrated (K. Murray 1977 ad indicem s.v. Oxford English Dictionary: size, problem of; Mugglestone 2005 ad indicem s.v. Oxford English Dictionary: scale of and attendant problems). Thirdly, the range of functions that the quotations must perform. They are “not merely examples” of the sense for which they are cited, but they must also present a coherent picture of the way in which, according to the lexicographers’ judgement, a word and its senses have proliferated: this requires at least one quotation a century. Fourthly, Murray indicates that he has sought to illustrate with the quotations how a sense has changed or been modified over time, even to the extent of indicating, “by negative evidence, its non-existence at the given date.” Finally, a significant implication of Murray’s account of the function of quotations is that each discernible sense is to be illustrated by at least one quotation. Given the restrictions on the total number of quotations already referred to, this meant (and

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means) that the quotations in OED cannot be taken to be representative of proportional usage in the period from which they come. If there is one quotation per century, then a rare word will receive the same number of quotations (namely one per century) as a ubiquitous word. Words at the margins receive the same treatment as those at the centre. No further discussion of the role of quotations was added to the first or second twentieth-century supplements or to the second edition of OED. However, a much fuller account has now appeared as part of the online introduction to the current revision of the dictionary, OED3 (Simpson 2000a). Here, Simpson describes how many non-literary sources are being read by the revisers in order to correct the literary bias of the first edition (a bias pointed to in Onions’ account quoted above, which specified poetic concordances as a first resort for editors seeking to augment inadequate quotation collections, and also evidenced by electronic searches of OED). Simpson in addition tells us that the enormous number of new quotations now being added to the OED files, together with extensive fresh bibliographic research, are rewriting, in far greater detail than previously possible, the record of language in the dictionary (see further quotation on pp. 126–7 below and Brewer 2004). For the purposes of this paper, his remarks on the lexicographers’ judgement as to how many quotations to quote, and with what chronological frequency, are particularly interesting: Various factors contribute to the number of quotations that are used to illustrate the history of a particular word or meaning in the Dictionary. In some cases (depending on the length of time a term has been recorded in English) an interval of fifty years between quotations might be appropriate. In others, a longer or shorter time span might be satisfactory. Other significant factors include the relative frequency of the term in a given period, the availability of quotation material, and the need to illustrate numerous spelling variants and grammatical structures. (Simpson 2000a)

Here we may note several important departures from Murray’s practice. First, Simpson specifies fifty years, rather than Murray’s century, as a possible guideline to quotation frequency; secondly, for the first time it seems that “relative frequency of [a] term in a given period” may now be taken into account in choosing how many quotations to include in the dictionary over a specific number of years; thirdly, it appears that it is not date and meaning alone that may justify printing a quotation, but also variations in spelling and grammatical structure. All these statements and accounts give us some sort of purchase in making shape of the pictures that emerge from the electronic searches of the OED which I began this paper by alluding to, and it is to one particular aspect of OED

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documentation—quotations from the eighteenth century—that I now wish to return. It has long been recognized that quotations from the eighteenth century in the Oxford English Dictionary seem to be fewer than for other periods, despite the major increase in literacy, reading, and publishing over this period.3 Why should this be? The first major researcher on OED methodology, Jürgen Schäfer, thought that readers’ slips for this period had somehow got lost, but documents from the late 1850s, i.e. the early days of the dictionary’s compilation, indicate that the American readers who had undertaken the task of reading books from the eighteenth century did not, for one reason or another, fulfil their promise. (US volunteers subsequently made an enormous contribution to the dictionary, which Murray gratefully acknowledged: J. Murray 1880–1, 123–4.) In 1879, when he became editor of the dictionary, Murray issued an appeal for more readers and reading in which he reported that “nearly the whole of that century’s books, with the exception of Burke’s works, have still to be gone through,” adding in the list of books which concluded it, “the literature of [the eighteenth] century has hardly been touched. Readers are safe with almost any eighteenth-century book they can lay their hands on” (Philological Society 1879, 3, and ibid., appended list 2; Brewer 2000, 45; Brewer 2006, 45). It is clear that Murray toiled heroically to fill the “serious gaps” he found in the quotation material. As he described in 1884, for more than five-sixths of the words we have had to search out and find additional quotations in order to complete their history, and illustrate the senses; for every word we have had to make a general search to discover whether any earlier or later quotations, or quotations in other senses, exist. (J. Murray 1882–4, 515–16)

But the evidence we can now turn up from electronic searching of the OED suggests that he was unsuccessful in this respect where the eighteenth century was concerned.

3

This increase has been extensively investigated in recent years: see e.g. Rivers (2001), Turner and Suarez (forthcoming). For comparison of OED with ESTC records, see Brewer 2005–6, “STC 1500–1799.”

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Table 8-1: Quotations per decade in OED2 According to the search tools on OED Online, there are 246,092 quotations in OED2 for the period 1500–1599; 380,471 for the period 1600–1699; 270,929 for the period 1700–1799; and 747,119 for the period 1800–1899. Table 8-1 represents this variation by plotting number of quotations per decade on a graph, reproduced from Examining the OED, a research project devoted to study of this dictionary and its sources.4 There are a number of ways in which one can review the issue of varying intensity of documentation in OED where eighteenth-century documentation is concerned. One is to conduct large electronic searches of the dictionary, taking 4

Brewer 2005–6, “1500–1899.” For an explanation of the different editions of OED and an account of the search procedures used to arrive at the data on which the graph is based, see Brewer 2005–6, “How to search OED” (the significant point is that electronic searches for quotations before 1850 or so are in effect searches of the original edition of the dictionary, OED1, although this material is accessed through searching OED2). Before the OED was put in electronic form as OED2, similar results were achieved by Schäfer (1980), who analysed a sample of the text in OED. Examining the OED has been supported by grants from the Research Development Fund of Oxford University, the Oxford News International Fund, and by a Laurence Urdang-DSNA Award, all of which are gratefully acknowledged by the present writer, leader of the project. Its searches of OED Online have been carried out by Christopher Whalen, who has also managed the database and created the website, and by Dan Calvert and Sarah McLoughlin, all of Hertford College, Oxford.

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the century as a (necessarily arbitrary) unit of analysis. For example, it is possible to identify the headwords in both OED2 and OED3 where there is a complete break in eighteenth-century documentation (that is, where there is at least one seventeenth-, and at least one nineteenth-, but no eighteenth-century quotations) by using the advanced search tools.5 Such a search produces 18,027 results in OED2, and 18,410 results in OED3 (searched January 2006). Both these figures seem significantly large, although in fact they do not include the many entries (like that for report, discussed below) with some eighteenthcentury quotations, but far fewer than those from the centuries on either side. A finding such as this, indicating that there are substantial numbers of words with what could be described as missing eighteenth-century quotations, points to a feature of both original and revised versions of the OED which is certainly worth investigating. Analysing these large quantities of results on OED Online in any detail, however, is difficult because of the long periods of time it takes to move between screens, and because the software programme retains records of searches for only 30 minutes or so. So the method I pursue in this paper is to consider individual entries in an attempt to see whether they shed light on the cumulative patterns of documentation represented both by these two specific searches and by Table 8-1 above. Any frequent user of the dictionary will be familiar with the distribution of quotations displayed under the verb report, where words or senses are liberally represented by quotations before and after the eighteenth century, but where there are no, or comparatively few, quotations, from the eighteenth century itself. There are 133 quotations altogether in OED2 for the various senses of this verb, distributed across the centuries as follows: Century Number of quotations

14th 2

15th 15

16th 33

17th 29

18th 6

19th 34

20th 14

All 133

Table 8-2: Distribution across centuries of quotations for verb report in OED26

5

On the Advanced search page for OED2 and OED3 respectively, search for “Entries” containing (“1800-1899” in quotation date) AND (“1600-1699” in quotation date) AND NOT (“1700-1799” in quotation date). 6 The table includes the thirteen quotations (twelve twentieth-century and one nineteenthcentury) added by Burchfield in vol 3 of his Supplement (1982). As Burchfield did not in general set out to provide recent quotations for senses already well illustrated with latenineteenth-century quotations, the total for the twentieth century is disproportionately low; see further Brewer (2004) 22–4.

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40 30 20 10 0 14th

15th

16th

17th

18th

19th

20th

Table 8-3: Number of quotations per century for verb report in OED2 Broadly speaking this individual pattern replicates that of the chronological distribution of the quotations in the dictionary overall, as represented in Table 8-1. Compiling this information on the verb report was relatively laborious, since there are (at present) no electronic short-cuts to working through each entry individually, nor, as already mentioned, are there efficient and comprehensive electronic means of identifying individual entries with low eighteenth-century documentation. Nevertheless, as the correspondence between Tables 8-1 and 8-3 would predict, such a pattern is typical of many other entries which I examined in a rough sampling of pages across the alphabet,7 as under the following headwords and countless others: aftermath, afternoon, afterward, aga (agha); blain (v., sense 1), blame (sb., sense 1), blameless (sense 2a), blamelessly, blamer, blameworthy; characterless, charactery, charcoal (sb.), chard2, chare1 (sense 5); divest (sense 3), divesture, some senses of divide (v.), divide (sb., sense 1), divided, dividedly, dividedness; escheat (sb., senses 2, 4), escheat (v.), escheated; fire-eyed, fire-flaught, firehouse, fire-pote, fire-proof; gabble (sb., senses 1, 2), gabble (v., sense 1), gaberdine (sense 2), gabion, gabioned, gable (sb1, sense 2); heavenful, heaven7

I leafed through a first edition of OED to find these, arbitrarily selecting one doublepage for each letter in an attempt to give a fair representative sample, and swiftly picked out words or senses documented with quotations both from the seventeenth century or earlier, and from the nineteenth-century, but with either no eighteenth-century quotations at all, or few (e.g. 1), compared with those (2 or more) provided from the centuries either side. The experiment can be easily and fruitfully replicated; cf. also note 5 above.

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Chapter Eight gate, heaven-high, heavenless, heavenlike, heavenly (senses 2, 3); impoverishing, impoverishment (sense 2), imprecate (senses 1b, 2), impregnable (fig. sense), impregnate (ppl. a.); jaculate, jaculation, jade (= horse); knab, knack (sb. 1), knacker 1 (sense 2), knag (sb 1, sense 2); lubberland, lubberlike, lubberly (adv.), lubish, lubric, lubrical, lubricity; matchable (sense 3), matched (sense 2), matcher, matchet, matching (ppl. a.), matchless, match-maker1 (sense 1) mate (sb.1b); nailed, nail-head (sense 1), nail-hole, naily, Nair, naïs (sense 1), nake (v.); outsideness, outsight1 (sense 1), outsit, outsparkle, outspeak, outspend, outspent, outspin (sense 2); palliard, palliate (sense 4), palliated, palliatory, pallium (sense 2a); quittance (sb., senses 1-3), quivering (vbl. sb.), Quixote (sense a [contrast the 3 18th-century quotations for sense b]); reave (v.1 sense 5c), reave (v.2), rebaptize (sense 2), rebaptizing; scroll (sb., senses 1b, 1c, 2b, 3b), scroll (v., sense 1), scrolled, scrotocele; trance (sb.1, sense 2) trance (sb. 2), trance (v.1, sense 2), trance (v.2), tranced, tranch; umbrous, umpirage, umpireship; vane (sense 1b), vanish (v., sense 2a); waif (sb.1, sense 2a), wail (v., senses 2, 4, 5a), wailer, wailing (vbl n.); (no examples of words beginning with x from the 2 pages selected, covering ‘X-xebec’, on which the majority of quotations were nineteenth-century); yet (senses 1a, 1c, 3b, 4b, 5b, 5c, 7, 8, 9); zelator (senses 1, 2), zendik, zenith (senses 1, 3).

The key question here is, does the chronological pattern of distribution in these items—that is, no or minimal examples of usage in the eighteenth century, despite (more) examples of usage in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries— tell us about the word concerned, or instead about the texts and periods most read by the lexicographers (or their readers, or both), and therefore most likely to yield quotations? In an attempt to answer this question, and assuming that documentation for the verb report is more or less representative of these many other entries, what can we make of its characteristics? First, we can note that the distribution of quotations varies between one sense and another. Ten main senses, comprising 28 sub-senses, are distinguished altogether of this verb. Of these 28, 13 are illustrated only with quotations previous to the eighteenth century, and six are illustrated only with quotations subsequent to the eighteenth century. In both these situations, the absence of eighteenth-century documentation in OED may reflect insufficient searching by the lexicographers rather than the demise or non-existence of the sense over this period. But it seems more promising to begin by looking closely at the senses where usage is first recorded before the eighteenth century, and last recorded after the eighteenth century—that is, in the remaining nine senses of the verb report—and to look particularly closely at the cases where there is a gap in the list of quotations during the eighteenth century. Such a gap occurs under senses 1a (“To relate, narrate, tell, give an account of”), 1b (as 1a, “const[ructed with] that or [the] inf[initive]”), 2b (“To repeat (something heard); to relate as having been spoken by another”), 5a (“To make

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report (on a person or thing); (obs.) to relate, state,” and 5b (“To make or draw up, to give in or submit, a formal report ...”). Here is the entry for 1a: 1. a. To relate, narrate, tell, give an account of (a fact, event, etc.). Also const. to a person. Now somewhat rare. c1386 CHAUCER Sqr.’s T. 64 Ther nys no man that may reporten al. c1386 ——Epil. Merch. T. 17 And I sholde rekenen euery vice Which þat she hath,..it sholde reported be And toold to hire. c1420 LYDG. Assembly of Gods 1486 When I came in I meruelyd gretly of that I behelde & herde there reporte. c1450 LOVELICH Grail xlii. 237 Nasciens to hym gan to Reporte In to whiche diuers Contre he gan Resorte. 1500-20 DUNBAR Poems xxxii. 69 This report I with my pen, How at Dumfermling fell the cace. 1509 HAWES Past. Pleas. XIII. (Percy Soc.) 52, I must procede, and shew of Arismetrik With divers nombres which I must reporte. 1573 G. HARVEY Letter-bk. (Camden) 10 If I shuld report and repeat al your wurship miht think me far wurs abusid. 1604 E. G[RIMSTONE] D’Acosta’s Hist. Indies III. ix. 144 It were a very difficult matter, to report particularly the admirable effectes which some windes cause. 1634 MILTON Comus 127 ’Tis onely day-light that makes Sin Which these dun shades will ne’re report. 1667 — — P.L. VI. 21 He..found Already known what he for news had thought To have reported. 1859 TENNYSON Elaine 625 Came the Lord of Astolat out, to whom the Prince Reported who he was. 1883 Century Mag. Oct. 927/2 ‘Outre-Mer’, a young poet’s sketch-book, reports his first transition from cloister life to travel and experience.

Perhaps the first thing to explain (and then set on one side for present purposes) is the editorial comment that this sense is “Now somewhat rare.” That word “Now” was written in 1906, the year in which the fascicle for the alphabetic range reign–reserve was published. Much of the entry for report, in common with the vast majority of entries in OED1, was left unchanged both in the 1972– 86 supplement (in which Burchfield added three new sub-senses) and in OED2. Clearly the usage is now, in 2006, a familiar one and has been so for many years. Where the quotations are concerned, we may observe the predominantly literary canonical character of the sources—two each from the poetry of Chaucer and Milton, and one each from that of Lydgate, Dunbar, Hawes, and Tennyson. The literary bias of the OED has already been noted. It was an unexceptionable assumption at this time that, in the words of the American linguist William Dwight Whitney,

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Chapter Eight The great body of literary works of acknowledged merit and authority, in the midst of a people proud and fond of it, is an agent in the preservation and transmission of any tongue, the importance of which cannot be easily overestimated. (Whitney 1867, 23)

So we need not be surprised by this favouring of literary sources as evidence for language usage more generally, which is entirely characteristic of the dictionary (see further Brewer 2005–6, “Literature and the nation”). Three of the authors instanced here—Milton, Chaucer, and Tennyson—are among the ten most frequently cited sources in the OED, partly, no doubt, on account of the availability of concordances for Milton and Tennyson (Prendergast 1857; Cleveland 1867; Brightwell 1869; Langley 1870; Bradshaw 1894), and the full glossary to the definitive edition of Chaucer recently published in 1894 by Skeat, a close friend of Murray who had from the beginning been associated with the plans for the dictionary which was to become the OED (Skeat 1894; K. Murray 1977, 140f and passim). The most striking feature of the treatment of this sense, however, is the gap in quotations between Milton and Tennyson. Is it really the case that report was not used in this way between the 1670s and 1850s? It seems implausible. But what is the significance of this interruption in the OED record, one which as already indicated can be found in many other entries? To consider this, we can return to Murray’s own words on the role and function of quotations in his dictionary. As we have seen, he stressed that “only a minimum of quotations [could be] selected from the material available” when choosing quotations for an entry. But that is not a helpful explanation here— why two quotations from Chaucer and two from Milton if space was at a premium? Murray also described how the job of quotations was to illustrate the historical development of a word or sense, and “even, by negative evidence, its non-existence at the given date.” How much weight does this statement allow us to put on “negative evidence”? Does the gap between 1667 and 1859 qualify as such? Or does it instead indicate that Murray did not inherit suitable quotations for this sense of the verb report, and that although, as we have seen him describe, “for more than five-sixths of the words we have had to search out and find additional quotations in order to complete their history, and illustrate the senses,” report was somehow passed over? One way of resolving this question is to make independent searches for this sense of the verb report over the missing years. Here we have many more resources to hand than did the original lexicographers, thanks to the revolution in electronic media. Major databases for the eighteenth century now include the Chadwyck-Healey collection of English literature (LiON) and Eighteenthcentury collections online (ECCO). How easy is it to find eighteenth-century

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instances of the verb report, in one of the senses under-represented in OED, in the various texts stored in these collections? The answer is, very easy. If you type in report as a search term in full text, in ECCO, limiting the search by date to the years 1700–1799, you get nearly 60,000 hits (59,179), which correspond to items in this database containing one or (many) more examples of the word report.8 The database allows swift access to facsimile text of every one of these examples, which I chose to order by ascending date of publication, and a rapid survey of the first few pages of hits revealed over half a dozen examples of the verb report (amid many more examples of the noun report), all from non-literary sources, religious and legal, apparently unrecorded in the OED; these are detailed in section 1 of the appendix to this paper, which is posted online at Brewer 2005–6 “Library section.” Searching LiON turned up a good quantity of further examples (again amid a much larger store of noun hits), notably six from the work of Pope. Of these, four were from the Iliad (1715): Go then, to Greece report our fixt Design; Bid all your Counsels, all your Armies join ... (9:544–5) With Grief I see the great Machaon bleeds. This to report, my hasty Course I bend; Thou know'st the fiery Temper of my Friend. (11:797–99) Iris! descend, and what we here ordain Report to yon’ mad Tyrant of the Main. (15:180–1) Lest any Argive, (at this Hour awake, To ask our Counsel or our Orders take,) Approaching sudden to our open’d Tent, Perchance behold thee, and our Grace prevent. Should such report thy honour’d Person here, The King of Men the Ransom might defer. (24:818–23)

8

Searches reported here were made in October–December 2005. Many of these hits (though none discussed or taken into consideration unless specifically indicated) occur in dictionaries, in multiple copies of the same text, or in editions of works originally published before the eighteenth century. It should also be noted that the reliability of the searches in ECCO varies according to the legibility of the facsimiles with respect to the word searched for. While results for report seemed consistently accurate, those for lob (another word with low eighteenth-century documentation for which I searched ECCO) were not, as the word was consistently misidentified in some of the indistinctly printed sources. I have therefore confined my analysis to words reliably identified in this database.

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The other two were from the Odyssey (1725–1726): Bid him, arriv’d in bright Calypso’s court, The Sanction of th’assembled pow’rs report. (1:106–7) Say, royal youth, sincere of soul report What cause hath led you to the Spartan court? (4:421–22)

This is striking, since Pope is probably the single most extensively cited eighteenth-century author in OED (see Table 8-4 below), and since these two translations from Homer furnish around 40% of the total number of quotations attributed to this poet in the dictionary. There are ca. 5,800 quotations from Pope’s work in OED2, of which ca. 1,500 (25%) are from the Odyssey and something under 900 (15%) from the Iliad.9 Nevertheless, these examples of the verb report, all arguably good examples of OED sense 1a, were missed. On the basis of this preliminary study it seems reasonable to assume that one could easily turn up many more such instances. It also seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that the absence or low representation of eighteenth-century usage of the verb report in the OED does not accurately reflect the language of the time. We have already established that the intention of the OED was not to be representative of the relative usage of words or senses, but to record instances, one a century, of their usage if such was available. So the comparative rarity (as suggested by ECCO and LiON) of the verb report, as against the noun, in eighteenth-century texts is not a sufficient reason not to record the usage of the verb over this period. Swift searches of a comparable kind readily furnish eighteenth-century instances of many other words where documentation from this period in OED is also missing or sparse. I give full accounts of three, afternoon, aftermath, afterward, in the Appendix (section 2). There seems no reason to think that these examples are not representative of perhaps hundreds more, given the comparatively low total number of eighteenth-century quotations in the dictionary. At this stage we may pause and ask ourselves why such examples should have been missed. Where the verb report is concerned, we may speculate that, 9

Pope shared his translation of the Odyssey with two collaborators, Elijah Fenton and William Broome, who between them were responsible for half the books, Fenton taking I, IV, XIX, and XX, and Broome II, VI, VIII, XI, XII, XVI, XVIII, and XXIII. Pope translated the rest and revised the whole: Johnson commented, “How the two associates performed their parts is well known to the readers of poetry, who have never been able to distinguish their books from those of Pope” (Johnson 1779–81/2006, 3:90). OED3 distinguishes between the translators of the Odyssey, with the result that quotations for this work attributed to Pope are dropping in number as OED3 revision progresses.

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because the word is not morphologically distinct from the far more common noun (for which OED supplies relatively more, if not abundant, eighteenthcentury quotations), it was therefore less likely to catch the eye of vigilant volunteer readers.10 That explanation will not do for aftermath, however: and indeed it is very difficult to produce, and convincingly defend, plausible explanations that would apply across the board to the numerous further examples, of varying types, one can turn up in similar investigations of meagre eighteenth-century documentation. If we extrapolate from these examples it would seem likely that scanty representation of this period is due to the lexicographers (and in some cases, perhaps, the limitations on the material available to them) and not to the language itself. We may also have to accept the proposition that, consciously or unconsciously, the first-edition editors of OED felt, when shaping the entry for a word, that eighteenth-century quotations were less interesting or important than those from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries, despite the declared aim to provide at least one quotation a century. This disregard may be helpfully elucidated by exploring nineteenth-century accounts of eighteenthcentury literature and language (for recent discussion, see the essays in O’Gorman and Turner 2004). Swinburne, for example, writing in 1868, reminds his readers that Blake lived at a time when the very notion of poetry, as we now understand it, had totally died and decayed out of the minds of men; when we not only had no poetry, a thing which was bearable, but had verse in plenty; a thing which was not in the least bearable (Swinburne 1868, 8)

He likewise comments on some of Blake’s early lines (“My lord was like a flower upon the brows | of lusty May”) that they are “Verses not to be despised, when one remembers that the boy who wrote them ... was living in full eighteenth century” (Swinburne 1868, 11). The conclusion that the use of eighteenth-century texts by OED1 lexicographers was shaped by their attitudes to the period is incidentally 10 There is good reason to think that relative familiarity or conspicuousness of word-form played a significant part in evidence-gathering for the OED. The first set of instructions to readers had asked them to pick out quotations only for words not included in concordances to the Bible and Shakespeare, thus encouraging selection of unusual rather than usual words; Murray famously complained that as a consequence he was oversupplied with quotations for eccentric vocabulary, ending up with 50 instances of abusion, and only five of abuse (J. Murray 1879, 572). A good illustration of the consequence of such practice is the OED1 quotation record for the verb mirror, which begins with 1820 (Keats); the OED3 revisers have found earlier examples in Hoccleve (1410) and Nashe (1593), both of which authors were also read and quoted by OED1.

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supported by the list of eighteenth-century authors particularly well treated by the lexicographers, readily understandable as reflecting late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century tastes:

Table 8-4: OED favourite 18th-century sources (Brewer 2005–6, “18c sources”) As I have described elsewhere, these mainly comprise the major male canonical authors, with only one highly quoted female author, Frances Burney, among their number. The exception in this list of literary authors is Nathan Bailey, who is quoted, for material in one or other of his dictionaries, nearly 4,600 times. This is another matter that needs further investigation: citation from early eighteenth-century dictionaries in the OED seems to be unusually intense, perhaps because quotations from this period were in relatively scarce supply (see further Brewer 2006, 47). Additional searches suggest a reasonably strong correlation between the number of OED quotations and late-nineteenth-century literary values. Two examples, selected from many possible candidates, may serve as illustration. First, William Blake, who was minimally but not negligibly treated by the dictionary. His total of 108 quotations in the first edition of OED (mostly from texts published before 1800) was possibly influenced by two signficant studies of his work, by A. Gilchrist and by the poet Swinburne, both of which sought to establish him as a great and hitherto unjustly neglected poet, and both of which were published and swiftly reprinted in the 1860s, when reading for the OED was getting under way (Gilchrist, Linton, et al. 1863; Swinburne 1868; see also

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Bentley 1975).11 A contrasting case is that of A. L. Barbauld (1743–1825), a distinguished, productive, and contemporarily acclaimed poet and essayist (see Newlyn 2000, 134–69, and McCarthy 2004). Her Poems went through five editions between 1773 and 1777 and were described by the Monthly Review as having “a justness of thought, and vigour of imagination, inferior only to the works of Milton and Shakespeare” (Woodfall 1773, 54), and her other works were similarly often reprinted. She is quoted just 18 times in all in OED1. Ridicule by S. T. Coleridge and others, together with her gender, probably played a part in this near-exclusion (Coleridge 1808–19/1987, 1:406-8; Vargo 1998; on OED’s treatment of female authors see Baigent, Brewer, and Larminie 2005). Yet it is easy to find examples in her works of usages that would valuably supplement the OED record for the eighteenth century. For instance, in line 3 of “To a little invisible being who is expected soon to become visible” (written 1795), she provides an additional eighteenth-century quotation for pledge (n) 2d (“Applied to a child, as a token or evidence of mutual love and duty between parents, or as a hostage given to fortune”); in line 4, an adverbial instance of auspicious, unrecorded in OED2; in line 11, a second eighteenthcentury example of swarm (n) 2, not a contemptuous usage, by contrast with the existing quotations, to match the two sixteenth-century and nineteenth-century ones; at line 4 of “Washing Day” (1797), an instance of slipshod (a) 2a antedating the four nineteenth-century examples (starting with Leigh Hunt in 1815)—and no doubt there are many others .12 Whether the comparative paucity of quotations in OED from this period is due to under-reading of this period and hence a comparatively low stock of quotations to draw on, or instead to the lexicographers’ preferences for certain sorts of quotation sources over others—or, perhaps most likely, to a combination of these two factors—the consequences of so reduced and selective an array of quotations are, I suggest, highly significant. As we have seen, quotations in OED are not so much illustrative as constitutive of meaning—for that is the implication of the definition methods described so vividly by Murray and Onions, quoted at the start of this article. This is fully recognized by the present-day OED lexicographers as well as by their predecessors. Thus Penny Silva writes,

11

OED3 is steadily adding to the numbers of quotations from Blake and has increased them by 40 so far (56 over the revised alphabet range M–philandering, compared with OED2’s 16). 12 OED3 has added 13 new quotations from Barbauld’s work, less than half the number added for Blake (see preceding note), bringing her total to 31 quotations in all—still tiny in comparison with many male authors.

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Chapter Eight The discovery of meaning in the quotations was acknowledged by Murray when he noted that [as quoted above] “the explanations for the meanings have been framed anew upon a study of all the quotations for each word collected for this work,” and explained that it was from the quotations “and the researches for which they provide a starting point,” that “the history of each word is deduced and exhibited.” (Silva 2000, 90, quoting Murray 1887, 19)

Fewer quotations from the eighteenth century meant less evidence of usage for this period, and less opportunity for eighteenth-century lexical productivity and innovation of one sort or another to impress itself on the lexicographers in the manner that we have already seen graphically reported by Murray: “You sort your quotations into bundles on your big table, and think you are getting the word’s pedigree right, when a new sense, or three or four new senses, start up, which upset all your scheme, and you are obliged to start afresh.” Churlish as it seems to criticize this great dictionary, we may wonder what aspects of eighteenth-century language might have started up in front of the eyes of the lexicographers had their eighteenth-century evidence been fuller? What examples of characteristic or uncharacteristic language usage over this period may they consequently have failed to document in the OED? Now, however, OED is being revised, and decisions taken 75–120 years ago, based on imperfect collections of data, are being revisited and re-considered in the light of extensive accumulations of additional primary material (see further Brewer 2004). The team of lexicographers assembled for the purpose, under John Simpson, have been working on the revision since the 1990s, and since 2000 they have been gradually publishing the results online. At the time of the Gargnano conference, June 2004, they had revised the alphabet range Morature, and at the present time of writing, December 2005, they have completed the letter o and penetrated into the letter p as far as philandering. So how will OED3 seek to correct its predecessors’ unevenness of documentation of various sources and periods? In his Introduction to OED3, Simpson remarks on the perceived literary bias of his predecessors, and comments, “A closer examination of earlier editions shows that this view has been overstated, though it is not entirely without foundation” (Simpson 2000a). By contrast, The revised text makes use of many non-literary texts which were not available to the original Victorian readers and their immediate successors, particularly social documents such as wills, inventories, account books, diaries, journals, and letters such as the York Civic Records, Gilbert White’s Journals, and the Diaries of Robert Hooke. The inclusion of material from sources such as these allows the editors to provide a fuller picture of the vocabulary of (especially) the Early Modern period. Further reading of similar sources will doubtless result in

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additional significant discoveries, as will the re-examination of texts already “read” for the Dictionary. (ibid.)

Elsewhere, describing the reading programme, he writes The original Dictionary relied heavily on a small number of authors (notably, of course, Shakespeare) for its coverage of Early Modern English (1500–1700). Today, readers systematically survey a much broader spectrum of texts from this and other periods. A separate Historical Reading Programme has been created to serve this function. ... In addition to the “traditional” canon of literary works, today’s Reading Programme covers women’s writing and non-literary texts which have been published in recent times, such as wills, probate inventories, account books, diaries, and letters. The programme also covers the eighteenth century, since studies have shown that the original Oxford English Dictionary reading in this period was less extensive than it was for the previous two centuries. Also carefully perused are the books and articles by other scholars who have studied the language of individual authors of the Early Modern English period. ... Taken as a whole, these Reading Programmes represent one of the most extensive surveys of the English language ever undertaken. Since the first publication of the Oxford English Dictionary, the breadth of materials available and the means of retrieving and analyzing those materials have expanded incalculably. Despite the changes, the original aim of the programme remains unaltered since the days of James A. H. Murray: to collect examples of the changing vocabulary of English from a highly diverse range of published sources spanning the entire English-speaking world, and to provide the Oxford English Dictionary’s editors with a constantly updated and ever more detailed record of English past and present. (Simpson 2000b)

What changes have therefore taken place in the representation of eighteenthcentury language? Simpson states that this has been a particular focus of the new reading programmes, and it is clear that the vast quantity of scholarship and publishing on eighteenth-century language, literature, and culture that has appeared since 1928—including the substantial reconfiguration of earlier views of the canon, as instanced in the work of Lonsdale (1984, 1989)—will have greatly changed the ways in which we might regard and evaluate eighteenthcentury vocabulary. To get a broad picture of OED3’s activities in this respect, we need to isolate the alphabet range so far revised by OED3, i.e., from M to philandering (December 2005), and compare the number of quotations per century for this alphabet range only, as in Table 8-5 below:

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140000 120000 100000 80000 60000 40000 20000 0 1500-1599

1600-1699 OED2

1700-1799

1800-1899

OED3

Table 8-5: OED2 and OED3 quotations per century 1500-1899 over Mphilandering (data collected January 2006) It is clear that the revisers are doing something to redress the apparent imbalance in documentation of the eighteenth century as compared with its neighbouring centuries; not enough, however, to make a consequential change to the proportions already established in the parent dictionary. The revisers’ policy seems rarely to exclude quotations already present in OED2, at least for pre-twentieth-century sources, but instead to seek out additional quotations, as well as check and if necessary re-date—usually by just a few years—the thousands of existing quotations in OED2. This means that the original distribution of quotations in OED still significantly influences that in OED3, as visible in the relative proportions between centuries above.13 But the picture is more complicated if one looks at the different stages of OED3 revision, as in Table 8-6:

13 It is impossible to check systematically whether quotations included in the first (or second) edition are now being omitted from the third; my own use of OED Online suggests that significant quotation exclusion is only occurring in the twentieth-century section of the dictionary, in cases where the Supplement editor R. W. Burchfield illustrated usages with over-enthusiastic abundance. See further Brewer 2004, 36–7.

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Century

16th 17th 18th 19th

129

OED2 total quotations (whole dictionary), % per century

OED3 new quotations M-philandering, percentage per century Mnipissingoverzealousnessnipissing overzealousness philandering (Sept (Dec 04) (Dec 05) 03)

OED3 new quotations Mphilandering, % per century

15 22 16 47

13 18 19 50

14 21 18 47

14 19 19 48

10 20 25 45

Table 8-6: Comparison of OED2 and OED3 PERCENTAGES of quotations for 1500-1899 over revised alphabet range M- philandering (i.e. the OED3 revision up to December 2005) For our purposes, the significant information in Table 8-6 is what it shows about the proportion of eighteenth-century quotations in OED. (The most striking aspect of Tables 8-5 and 8-6 is the dominance of the nineteenth century in both OED2 and OED3. This is presumably because words current in the nineteenth century include many of those already in existence in previous centuries, together with a good number of new coinages, or new senses of existing words; it may also be because sources for this period are and were more readily available).14 The OED3 revisers had corrected this proportion slightly by November 2004, raising it from 16% to 19%, and it is now still at that level or thereabouts (18%). But over the last year, from December 2004 to December 2005, they have substantially increased their relative collection of eighteenthcentury quotations, and brought it up to 25% (at the expense, apparently, of sixteenth-century quotation collection). If this recent trend continues, then the proportions of quotations per century in the OED may look very different in the next few years. These findings suggest several possible interpretations and several possible directions for future research and investigation. The one I want to take up here, however, is the one we have already pursued in relation to the OED2 evidence: what light does consideration of individual entries shed on the cumulative patterns of documentation represented in Tables 8-5 and 8-6? Searching for entries with eighteenth-century gaps in the quotation record in OED3, which so far exists only in electronic form, is more difficult than in its print predecessors, as one cannot visually scan large numbers of items at a time by leafing through the work manually. I began with the items in the revised alphabet range (M–philandering) identified above as having either (1) one or 14

See further discussion at Brewer 2005–6, “OED3 1500–1899.”

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more seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century quotations but no eighteenthcentury quotations in OED2, or (2) two or more seventeenth-century and two or more nineteenth-century quotations, but only one eighteenth-century quotation, and compared their documentation in this respect with that in OED3, with results presented in Table 9-7 below: Word (and sense as in OED2) 1. matchable (sense 3) 2 matched (sense 2) 3. matcher 4. matchet16 5. matching (ppl. a.) 6. matchless (a) 7. match-maker1 (sense 1) 8. mate (sb.1b) 9. nailed (ppl. a. sense 1, e.g. nailed shoe) 10. nailed (ppl. a. sense 1b, form nailed-on) 11. nailed (ppl. a. sense 2, e.g. longnailed hand) 12. nail-head (sense 1) 13. nail-hole 14. naily 15. Nair 15

Number of OED2 quotations 17c 18c 19c 2 0 1

Number of OED3 quotations 17c 18c 19c 2 0 1

18th-cent. gap continues in OED3? YES

1

0

4

0

0

2

NO15

3 3 1

0 0 0

1 5 1

3 4 2

0 0 0

1 7 1

YES YES YES

2 2

1 1

2 2

2 2

2 1

2 3

NO YES

1

0

2

-

-

-

2

0

2

2

1

2

(re-analysed in OED3) YES

1

0

2

-

-

-

(re-analysed in OED3)

1

0

2

1

0

2

YES

1

0

2

2

0

2

YES

2 1 2

1 0 1

3 2 2

2 1 3

2 0 2

3 2 3

NO YES YES

A 16th-century quotation has been excised in OED3, presumably because it proved unreliable when checked. 16 OED3 treats this word under the headword machete.

Reporting Eighteenth-Century Vocabulary in the OED

Word (and sense as in OED2) 16. naïs (sense 1) 17. nake (v.) 18. outsideness 19. outsight1 (sense 1)17 20. outsit (sense 1) 21. outsparkle 22. outspeak (all senses) 23. outspend (v.) 24. out-spent (ppl. a.) 25. outspin (sense 2) 26. palliard 27. palliate (sense 4) 28. palliated (sense 1) 29. palliatory

17

Number of OED2 quotations 17c 18c 2 0 3 0 1 0 1 0

19c 1 1 2 2

Number of OED3 quotations 17c 18c 2 2 3 0 2 0 1 0

19c 1 1 2 3

NO YES YES YES

2

0

1

3

0

2

YES18

2 5

0 0

2 4

1 7

2 4

1 7

NO19 NO20

1 1

0 0

4 1

7 1

0 0

6 3

YES21 YES

2

0

1

4

0

3

YES

2 2

0 1

2 2

2 2

1 2

2 2

YES NO

3

0

2

2

0

2

YES22

1

0

1

1

0

2

YES

131

18th-cent. gap continues in OED3?

Becomes outsight n.2 (sense 2) in OED3. OED3 has antedated outsit sense 2 (in OED2 evidenced with 19th-century quotations only), with two 17th-century quotations, resulting in an additional gap in documentation for the 18th century. 19 An extremely unusual pattern of revision for OED3. OED2’s first 17th-century example has been re-allocated to a different part of the entry for grammatical reasons (it is a past participle adjective), two new 18th-century quotations have been found (for 1702 and 1708), and the two OED2 19th-century quotations—one from Byron and one from Robert Browning—both dropped in favour of a new one (1848, from George Lippard, Bel of Prairie Eden: a romance of Mexico). 20 Re-analysed with new quotations in OED3; 18th-century quotation gap in any of four individual senses disappears. 21 OED2’s two senses now re-analysed as three, with many more quotations found (but not for 18th century). 22 See note on matched above. 18

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30. pallium (sense 2a) TOTALS (excluding numbers for items 8 and 10 where OED3 has reanalysed senses)

1

0

3

1

1

2

NO

52

5

58

65

20

70

20 ‘YES’ 8 ‘NO’

Table 8-7: OED’s treatment of 18th-century dip in selection of revised words (minor changes e.g. date changes of a few years, re-writing of definitions, etc., are not noted here unless relevant) What most struck me in working through OED3 in this way—over a minute fraction of the revision so far completed—was the huge industry that has gone into both the accumulation of new quotations and the checking and re-dating of existing ones. In three of these thirty examples, the new quotations enabled substantive re-analysis of meaning. In many of the examples, numerous quotations have been added both before and after the seventeenth, eighteenth ,and nineteenth centuries (not recorded in my table), and in all cases the definitions have been rewritten and all the additional features of the entries (etymology, spelling, pronunciation, etc) have been updated. As anyone who has worked with the new edition can attest, it is a tour de force. It is clear that the lexicographers have applied themselves to supplementing the eighteenth-century record. Nevertheless, as the totals in Table 8-7 show, eighteenth-century gaps in documentation—though significantly reduced—still remain, according to this very small sample of items, and confirm the larger patterns suggested in Tables 8-5 and 8-6 (in fact this sample seems to have thrown up an unrepresentatively high degree of eighteenth-century quotation supplementation). What does this tell us? The increase in quotations for the eighteenth century in OED3 indicates that this period has after all proved perfectly adequate to provide examples of usage. The significant trough in OED documentation in the first (and second) edition must therefore be the result of imperfect quotation searching, and should not be interpreted as evidence that the various words and senses simply did not exist over these years. But is this the correct explanation too for what continues (despite the increase) to be the relative paucity of quotation in OED3? That is, does the data in Tables 8-5 and 8-6 above indicate that the lexicographers have not yet searched hard enough in sources published between 1700 and 1799?

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To illuminate this further question, I searched LiON and ECCO for the various items listed in Table 8-7, to get a sense of how easy it is to turn up further eighteenth-century examples of words still relatively under-quoted in OED3. The results are reported in the Appendix (section 3). Of the twenty instances where OED3 eighteenth-century documentation continues low or altogether absent, I found suitable quotations (usually several) for ten items, found dictionary definitions (like those often cited elsewhere in both OED1 and OED3) for two items, drew a complete blank with four items, and was unable to make efficient electronic searches (owing to the form of the word) for four items. In the course of searching, I came across good quotations for two further words or senses (nailhead 2a, a specialised architectural usage, and overmatching) which at present have no eighteenth-century evidence in OED. I conclude that the continuing deficiency of eighteenth-century quotations in OED is certainly remediable, and that the gap in documentation 1700-1799 tells us about the lexicographers and the material available to them, and not about the English language. What more might analysis of individual words and quotations reveal? I complete this paper with a discussion of OED’s treatment of the word matchmaker, as a representative example of my argument that more examination of eighteenth-century usage would valuably enhance the lexicographical record. This word, in OED’s first sense, viz. “One who brings about or negotiates a match or marriage; usually, one who is addicted to scheming to bring about marriages,” is documented as follows in OED1 (reproduced unchanged in OED2), with two seventeenth-century, one eighteenth-century, and two nineteenth-century quotations: a1639 W. WHATELY Prototypes I. xi. (1640) 102 Pray to God to give a wife or husband to your sonne and daughter, and make piety and vertue the chiefe match-makers. 1678 BUTLER Hud. III. i. 420 Who..would have hir’d him and his imps, To be your match-makers and pimps. 1771 SMOLLETT Humph. Cl. Let. i. 14 June, Perhaps the match-maker is to have a valuable consideration in the way of brokerage. 1855 MACAULAY Hist. Eng. xvi. III. 724 Clarendon assumed the character of a matchmaker. 1881 E. J. WORBOISE Sissie xi, Mrs. Williams..was frequently accused of being ‘a match~maker’, and bent on marrying her daughters brilliantly

OED3 has revised the entry (including the definition) to produce the following: A person who brings about or negotiates a marriage; a marriage broker. Also freq. in weakened sense: a person, usually a woman, who enjoys scheming to bring about romantic relationships.

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Chapter Eight 1638 T. HEYWOOD Wise-woman III. i. sig. D4, I am provided for bringing young Wenches to bed; and for a need, you see I can play the Match-maker. 1678 S. BUTLER Hudibras III. i. 25 Who..would have hir’d him and his Imps, To be your Match-makers and Pimps. 1771 T. SMOLLETT Humphry Clinker I. 220 Perhaps, the match-maker is to have a valuable consideration in the way of brokerage. 1834 Pearl & Lit. Gaz. 4 Jan. 87/3 No wonder all these accomplishments rendered my uncle an object for the match makers of our village to exercise their innocent propensities upon. 1855 MACAULAY Hist. Eng. III. xvi. 724 Clarendon assumed the character of a matchmaker. 1881 E. J. WORBOISE Sissie xi, Mrs. Williams..was frequently accused of being ‘a match~maker’, and bent on marrying her daughters brilliantly. 1937 R. K. NARAYAN Bachelor of Arts ix. 123 Ganapathi Sastrigal..was matchmaker in general to a few important families. 1988 Courier-Mail (Brisbane) 19 Sept. 22/5 Back as TV’s match-maker from tonight is Greg Evans on Channel 10's Perfect Match at 5.30.

The record has been antedated, postdated, and expanded. Notably, however, the additions have been nineteenth- and twentieth-century. The eighteenth century remains, as before, illustrated with one quotation only, in comparison with two for the seventeenth century and now three for the nineteenth century. Does this constitute, as an indication of the usage of matchmaker in the eighteenth century, something approaching the “negative evidence” (to quote Murray in 1888), from which one may infer “the relative frequency of the term in a given period” or “the availability of quotation material” (to quote Simpson in 2000)? Whether it does or not, ECCO—a resource that became available in spring 2004, after this word had been revised in OED3—provides ample evidence to supplement OED’s eighteenth-century record for this word. Searching for matchmaker in “full text,” in sources dated 1700-1799, produces 86 hits (searching for the plural form matchmakers produces a further 61), including many of an interesting and various nature which would have helpfully informed OED’s account, in particular (judging from the hits I sampled) illustrating the strong negative character of the term in this period: for example “Margaret Cheatly, Bawd, Matchmaker, and Midwife of Bloomsbury, by immoderate drinking of Strong-waters, had got a Nose so termagantly Rubicund, that she out-blaz’d the comet” (Brown et al. 1703, 51; this formulation is more or less repeated in several other texts); or “Say’st thou so, old Satan! (Spoken to a Woman, who was a Matchmaker)” (Bedford 1730, 264). These, together with many similar examples in ECCO’s eighteenth-century sources, tempt one to ask whether the OED1 and OED3 definitions sufficiently distinguish the word’s potentially derogatory connotations—over this period at any rate (see the account of a matchmaker in The Spectator 1712/1755, no. 437), and arguably both before (cf. OED’s Heywood quotation) and after. Had eighteenth-century texts been more studied, the treatment of the word might have been different.

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Such disparity in documentation in the new as well as the old OED raises the same sorts of questions as before. Are the lexicographers receiving from their readers fewer quotations from this period than from others? Are they less interested in eighteenth-century sources? Do quotations from this period seem to them less deserving of inclusion in the dictionary? Do such quotations illustrate usage less usefully, or illuminatingly? Are there words and usages in this period which have continued to go undocumented because of this comparative disregard? Will this change in future, if OED3 revisers have better access to eighteenth-century sources (perhaps as a result of the availability of ECCO)? All these matters seem worthy of further investigation; but whatever the results of such investigation, they should be seen in their fuller context. The revisers of OED are engaged on a task of gigantic proportions. They have amassed countless numbers of new quotations for the dictionary, from a much wider range of texts than those examined by their predecessors. Using this new material they have transformed the record for hosts of words and senses, both major and minor, in the alphabet range so far treated. They are also checking and reviewing all the existing material in the dictionary, and updating or writing afresh all bibliographical, etymological, orthoepical, and many other types of information besides (for example, on usage: see Brewer 2005). The scale of their achievement so far, and their vision, industry and perseverance, is to be celebrated (as is the commitment of their publishers), in a task as daunting and as ambitious as that originally undertaken by Murray and his fellow-pioneers. Their revision of the OED is one of the most exciting and innovative events to have taken place for many years in lexicography. Observations and reservations such as are made here will I hope in some small way aid rather than hinder them in their magnificent scholarly undertaking.

CHAPTER NINE EXPEDIENCY AND EXPERIENCE: JOHN S. FARMER AND WILLIAM E. HENLEY’S SLANG AND ITS ANALOGUES JULIE COLEMAN 1. Farmer and Henley Slang and its analogues was first published in seven volumes between 1890 and 1904. Its subtitle gives some explanation for its length: A dictionary, historical and comparative, of the heterodox speech of all classes of society for more than three hundred years; with synonyms in English, French, German, Italian, etc. In the preface to the first volume, Farmer outlined his ambitious intentions. There was to be a chapter on the comparative study of European slang, a bibliography, a list of authorities and references to periodical literature, and a complete list of all foreign slang terms referred to. He promised that “This will form in itself a comprehensive dictionary of foreign slang” (Farmer 1890, x). None of these promises were fulfilled. As Lee Revens comments, “Apart from its admirably chosen title and subtitle, the work itself offers no discussion of the principles on which it was compiled, scant definitions of slang, and no comprehensive enumeration and classification of its analogues” (Revens 1966, vii). In his Prefatory Note, Farmer explained that citations would illustrate usage, and that he had been provided with about 12,000 by G. L. Apperson, who had worked on the NED. At this stage of the project, Farmer estimated that the work would contain “upwards of 100,000” citations in total (Farmer 1890, viii). Farmer compared his labour to that of Johnson: It is in very much the same position that I find myself, now that I have completed the first instalment of my own task, smaller and less important though it be. I am fully conscious of manifold imperfections; yet I hope, and indeed believe, that I have, in my presentation of what is generically known as “slang,” advanced the enquiry in some measure. While cordially acknowledging the aid I have derived from the labours of my predecessors in the field, I cannot but recognize that,

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again and again, having adopted a new mode of treatment, I have found myself forced to “blaze” the way into what was practically a terra incognita. (Farmer 1890, v)

Between this ambitious preface of 1890, and the appearance of the last volume in 1904, Farmer suffered a number of setbacks and changes. The dictionary was published for subscribers only, and was never likely to generate enough income for the intermittently impecunious Farmer to live on, but his financial situation was made worse by a dispute with his publisher, who wanted indecent terms in Volume II (C-Fizzle) to be removed. Farmer took his publishers to court to enforce the contract, but lost the case, and had to pay costs (Legman 1966, lviii; Atkinson xxvi, 3n1). The solution to Farmer’s financial difficulties appeared to be William Ernest Henley, who “let his name be used on Volume 2 in 1891 and on the subsequent five volumes through 1904 … [but] his part in it is not well understood” (Chapman 1986, viii). In fact, Henley’s name does not appear on all copies of Volume II (Atkinson 2003, xxvi).1 Henley was a prominent figure in literary London, well-connected, and knowledgeable in disreputable language. His reputation could only help the sales of the dictionary, and Farmer encouraged Henley to purchase books that would be useful as sources for the dictionary and repeatedly requested more direct financial support (e.g. Atkinson 2003, 15–23, 25, 28–36). Henley certainly provided corrections and additions in several drafts before proofs were produced. It is clear that J. A. H. Murray and Charles Whibley also provided detailed comments on individual entries in draft and proof form (Atkinson 2003, 3–4, 6–7, 9–10, 26–7). Although Farmer appears to have done much of the preparatory work, this somewhat undermines Partridge’s assessment of the dictionary as “one of the three or four most remarkable onehanded achievements in the whole record of dictionary-making” (Partridge 1970, 106).

2. My sample This paper will explore the make-up of Slang and its analogues and analyse changes that took place as the editors progressed through the alphabet. My main sample for this analysis is the first fifty senses from each letter. I have counted the following as entries: Separate definitions under main headwords Separate definitions under sub-headwords 1

Legman (1966, lix) dismisses the idea that Henley was involved from the start but initially chose to be unacknowledged.

138

Chapter Nine Phrases and compounds that are treated separately

For example, ugly includes five entries. Four are separate senses of the noun ugly, and one of the sub-headword ugly as an adjective: UGLY, subs. (colloquial).—I. An ugly person: also in contemptuous address … [1 citation] 2. (old).—A bonnet shade: worn by women as an extra protection from the sun: middle 19th century. [1 citation] 3. (common).—In pl. = delirium tremens; the HORRORS (q.v.). 4. (provincial).—A beating, a round of abuse (HALLIWELL). Adj. (colloquial).—Generic for disquiet or unpleasantness … [9 citations] See PLUG-UGLY.

Chisel includes two entries. One is the verb, and the other a phrase treated here as a sub-headword: CHISEL, CHIZZLE, or CHUZZLE, verb (common).—To cheat. [Possibly an extension of the orthodox meaning of the verb in the sense of ‘to cut, shave or pare with a chisel to an excessive degree.’ …] TO GO FULL CHISEL, phr. (American).—To go at full speed or ‘full drive’; to show intense earnestness; to use great force; to go off brilliantly.

The entry for Abraham-cove provides an example of compounds not treated separately: ABRAHAM-COVE, ABRAHAM-MAN, ABRAM-COVE, ABRAM-MAN, TOM OF BEDLAM’S MAN, OR BEDLAM BEGGAR, subs. (old cant).—It is difficult now-adays to trace with certainty the origin of these terms, notwithstanding a wealth of matter on the subject …

Despite the variant forms of the headword, I count this as only one entry. For an example of phrases not treated separately, see the entry for walk, quoted below. My main sample contains 1,265 entries from volumes I-VII. Some letters did not contain fifty entries, but from others I collected more than fifty: in order not to skew the sample, I did not stop collecting entries from any letter until I had reached the next main headword. Based on my sample, the dictionary contains approximately 20,300 entries in all. These are listed under approximately 10,750 main headwords, and 6,600 sub-headwords, across 2,736 pages.

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The first volume was reissued in a revised form in two parts, in 1903 and 1909,2 and my secondary sample is of 204 entries from the revised edition of Volume I. 92 of these (45%) were also found in the first edition. The remaining 112, rather more than half, are new entries.

3. The make-up of the dictionary It is possible to break down the structure of the entries in the dictionary to determine what kinds of information Farmer and Henley provide about the terms they list. In a work taking so long to complete, it is unlikely that a consistent style and methodology would be adopted from the first volume. By analysing the lexicographical features of entries for each letter of the alphabet, we can determine how Farmer and Henley’s practice developed as their work on the dictionary progressed. The fact that Farmer and Henley reissued Volume I, but not the later volumes, suggests that the intention was primarily to revise rather than to update their earlier work.

usage labels citations grammatical information cross-references etymology anecdotal or encyclopedic information indication of pronunciation English synonyms French synonyms Italian synonyms

2

entries from Vols I-VII 1110 87.8% 728 57.6% 914 72.3%

entries from Vol I, rev. 138 67.6% 99 48.5% 117 57.4%

507 199 23

40.1% 15.7% 1.8%

81 31 5

39.7% 15.2% 2.5%

6

0.5%

0

0.0%

86 46 9

6.8% 3.6% 0.7%

8 2 0

3.9% 1.0% 0.0%

I am grateful to Eric Stanley for drawing my attention to the revised volume when I presented an earlier draft of this paper at Gargnano.

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Spanish/Portuguese synonyms German synonyms

8

0.6%

0

0.0%

7

0.6%

0

0.0%

Table 9-1: Analysis of the contents of entries in Slang and its analogues The structure of entries within the dictionary varies from volume to volume. For example, Volume II includes significantly fewer main headwords than Volume I. Volume III sees a further drop (both p = 0.01). In Volume IV, the proportion of main headwords begins to rise again (p = 0.05), and although there is a continuing trend upwards, there are no statistically significant changes between volumes. The revised edition of Volume I, however, contains fewer main headwords than Volume VII (p = 0.01). Volume I Volume II Volume III Volume IV Volume V Volume VI Volume VII Volume I, revised

main headwords 67 67.0% 114 55.6% 37 37.0% 119 44.2% 125 49.2% 35 64.8% 172 60.8% 103 50.5%

Table 9-2: The distribution of main headwords There are two different kinds of efficiency at play here. The first explains the reduction in main headwords in Volumes I-III. Earlier volumes tended to accord separate main headword status to compounds and even sometimes to separate senses of the same word; later volumes tend to group them together under a single main headword. The following example shows the revised edition of Volume I streamlining entries taken from the original: Original edition of Volume I

Revised edition

BABE, subs. (parliamentary).—The last elected member of the House of Commons. The oldest representative of the chamber is called the FATHER OF THE HOUSE (q.v.).

BABE, subs. (parliamentary).—I. The last elected member of the House of Commons. Cf. FATHER OF THE HOUSE = the oldest representative. 2. (American). —The youngest

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Original edition of Volume I

Revised edition

(American). —The youngest member of a class at the United States Military College at West Point. A term sans wit, sans point, sans almost everything.

member of a class at the United States Military College at West Point. 3. (auctioneers’). —An auction SHARK (q.v.); a KNOCK-OUT (q.v.) man: for a consideration these men agree not to oppose the bidding of larger dealers, who thus keep down the price of lots. 4. (American). —A Baltimore rowdy: also BLOOD TUB (q.v.) and PLUG-UGLY (q.v.).

BABE IN THE WOOD, subs. phr. (old). — I. A victim of the law’s solicitude; in other words, a culprit sentenced to the stocks or the pillory. Obsolete. 2. Dice are also called BABES IN THE WOOD. BABES, subs (auctioneers’). —A set of auction thieves, who attend sales for the express purpose of blackmail. Their modus operandi is as follows. In consideration of a small bribe of money or beer, or both, they agree not to oppose the bidding of the larger dealers, who thus dishonestly keep down the price of lots. The practice is generally worked in connection with KNOCK-OUTS (q.v.). (American). —A set of Baltimore rowdies are so-called; at various times they have also received the names of BLOOD TUBS and PLUG-UGLIES (q.v.).

BABE IN THE WOOD, subs. phr. (old). — I. A culprit in the stocks or pillory. (GROSE). 2. (old).—In pl. = dice.

The second type of efficiency explains the decrease in sub-headwords towards the end of the alphabet. The entry for walk illustrates the later volumes’ further tendency to group minor phrases together rather than give them each separate sub-headword status: Also in VARIOUS PHRASES: Thus TO WALK ALONE = to be an outcast, forsaken, shunned; TO WALK THE HOSPITALS = to attend the medical and surgical practice of hospitals as a student under one of the qualified staff; TO WALK SPANISH = to be seized by the scruff and the seat and thus forced along, to act under compulsion; TO WALK ABOUT (military) = an occasional instruction from officers to sentinels for the purpose of waiving the ceremony of the salute …

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This same entry gives some more common phrases sub-headword status, including to walk the plank, to walk the streets, and walk, knave, walk (a rude phrase taught to parrots). The revised edition of Volume I is considerably more efficient than the original Volume I in this respect, but does not approach the sometimes rather summary efficiency of Volume VII.

4. Usage labels About 88% of the entries in my main sample include usage labels. The most frequently used is old, which appears in 25.6% of entries, followed by common (13.4%), colloquial (12.3%), and American or originally American (9.7%).3 4.7% of entries are labelled as cant or were described as belonging to thieves. So wedded were the editors to the practice of providing usage labels that 3.3% of entries were labelled as venery, which appears to function more as an indication of semantic field than as a usage label. Table 9-3 shows the distribution of usage labels in the various volumes of Slang and its analogues. Labels indicating falling usage are old and obsolete. Labels indicating wide usage are common, colloquial, now recognised, popular, general, familiar, and conventional. Occupational and professional slangs included range from chimneysweeps’ and servants’ words to parliamentary and legal language. Volume:

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

I rev

labels indicating wide usage labels indicating falling usage dialects of the British Isles Australian & Colonial terms American naval, nautical, or military theatrical & showmen other occupational or

29.8

29.1

39.8

30.6

24.3

27.7

29.9

22.9

19.0

26.1

25.2

29.3

33.2

29.8

22.4

31.2

6.0

1.0

0.0

3.4

6.1

0.0

6.0

3.8

1.2

0.5

0.0

0.3

0.4

0.0

1.9

1.9

13.1 1.2

9.0 4.5

9.7 1.0

10.1 3.0

8.5 4.0

4.3 10.6

11.2 3.4

5.1 2.5

0.0

3.5

2.9

0.7

0.8

6.4

1.5

0.0

8.3

5.0

1.9

5.1

5.3

6.4

4.1

3.2

3

I have yet to compare the terms labelled as American and originally American in Slang and its analogues with those found in Farmer’s previously published Americanisms, old and new (1889).

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Volume: professional slang school & university sporting slang slang cant venery vulgar other

143

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

I rev

4.8

5.0

3.9

2.4

4.0

2.1

7.1

8.9

1.2 0.0 8.3 0.0 6.0 1.2

6.0 3.0 4.0 2.5 0.0 0.5

3.9 0.0 2.9 4.9 3.9 0.0

1.7 1.7 6.4 5.1 0.3 0.0

0.8 2.4 6.5 2.8 0.8 0.0

0.0 2.1 4.3 4.3 0.0 2.1

2.2 1.1 4.1 3.0 1.1 1.1

2.5 1.3 7.6 7.0 0.6 1.3

Table 9-3: Distribution of usage labels by percentage of entries sampled. (The numerical data underlying this table are presented in Appendix 1 below). There is clearly considerable variation between volumes in their inclusion of usage labels. This does not necessarily reflect changes in the lexis included: Table 9-1 shows that 12.2% of entries in Volumes I-VII and 32.4% of entries in the revised edition of Volume I include no usage labels at all. A volume containing fewer terms marked as dialect might contain fewer dialect terms, but might contain the same proportion of dialect terms labelled as something else or not labelled at all. However, the decision not to label a term as dialect, for example, may represent the same rationale as a decision not to include dialect terms: a sense that dialect terms have no place in a dictionary of slang. The best place to look for evidence of changing ideas about what the dictionary should contain is the revised edition of Volume I. Table 9-4 separates the usage labels of this edition into two categories: those attached to entries carried over from the original edition, and those attached to new entries. labels indicating wide usage labels indicating falling usage dialects of the British Isles Australian & Colonial terms American

entries carried over

new entries

9

14.5%

24

32.9%

20

32.3%

23

31.5%

5

8.1%

1

1.4%

1

1.6%

2

2.7%

5

8.1%

1

1.4%

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naval, nautical, or military theatrical & showmen other occupational or professional school & university sporting slang slang cant venery vulgar other total

entries carried over 2 3.2%

new entries 1

1.4%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

4

6.5%

1

1.4%

3

4.8%

7

9.6%

2 1 7 1 1 1 62

3.2% 1.6% 11.3% 1.6% 1.6% 1.6% 100.0%

2 0 1 10 0 0 73

2.7% 0.0% 1.4% 13.7% 0.0% 0.0% 100.0%

Table 9-4: Usage labels attached to existing and new entries in the revised Vol. I Labels indicating wide or falling usage are the most common type in all volumes of the dictionary. They are distributed through the dictionary as shown by Fig. 9-1. labels indicating wide usage

labels indicating falling usage

45%

40%

35%

30%

25%

20%

Fig. 9-1: Labels showing wide and falling usage

new entries in Vol. I, rev.

Vol. I, rev.

Vol. VII

Vol. VI

Vol. V

Vol. IV

Vol. III

Vol. II

Vol. I

15%

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Volume IV contains significantly fewer labels indicating wide usage than Volume III. Volume VII contains significantly fewer labels indicating falling usage than Volume VI. The revised edition of Volume I contains significantly more labels indicating falling usage than the original edition (all p = 0.01). Reference to Table 9-4 demonstrates that this is not only because a greater proportion of new entries are labelled in this way, but also a greater proportion of existing entries (both p = 0.05): entries that were not labelled as old, obsolete, etc. in 1890, were in 1903 and 1909. Similarly, in comparison with the original edition of Volume I, a smaller proportion of carried-over entries in the updated edition are labelled as having wide usage (p = 0.05). geographically restrictive labels

professional & occupational labels

labels referring to schools and universities

'cant' and 'venery'

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

Fig. 9-2: Other groups of usage labels Fig. 9-2 shows other categories of label grouped together to emphasize some of the underlying tendencies. Although there is considerable variation between volumes, it is possible in each case to discern an overall trend, all of which are confirmed by looking at the new entries in the revised edition of Volume I. As they worked their way through the dictionary, Farmer and Henley tended to label fewer terms as geographically restricted or as belonging to particular professions or occupations. They tended to label more terms are belonging to the slang of educational establishments and as belonging to marginalized

new entries in Vol. I, rev.

Vol. I, rev.

Vol. VII

Vol. VI

Vol. V

Vol. IV

Vol. III

Vol. II

Vol. I

0%

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activities: crime and venery. This demonstrates a developing sense of what a slang dictionary should and should not include.4 Only fifteen terms in my sample are labelled vulgar (1.2%). Five of these are found in Volume I, which is a significantly higher proportion than in all the other volumes taken together. Fig. 9-3 shows that there is a sudden and significant decrease in Volume II, followed by a rise in Volume III. In Volume IV, the proportion of vulgar terms drops once more, and never really recovers (all p = 0.01); the rise in Volume VII is not statistically significant. The revised edition of Volume I not only contains no new entries labelled as vulgar, but also edits out four of the existing vulgar entries.

7% 6% 5% 4% 3% 2% 1%

new entries in Vol. I, rev.

Vol. I, rev.

Vol. VII

Vol. VI

Vol. V

Vol. IV

Vol. III

Vol. II

Vol. I

0%

Fig. 9-3: Terms labelled as vulgar At first glance, this might suggest that the editors censored their dictionary following the court case over Volume I. However, examination of the entries in question demonstrates that the label vulgar indicates the social class of a term’s users rather than its obscenity. For example: 4

The increased inclusion of school slang terms is also probably related to Farmer’s work on his Public school word book (1900). I have still to explore the relationship between these two word-lists.

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A-BEAR, v. (provincial and vulgar).—To suffer, or to tolerate. [From old English abearan, to bear or carry].—This term, though hoary with age, and long of honorable usage (from A.D. 885 downward), must now be classed with degenerate words, or at all events with non-literary English. Though still largely dialectical, its use amongst people of education is reckoned vulgar. It is now invariably employed in conjunction with ‘cannot’ — ‘I cannot ABEAR furriners.’

The treatment of vulgar terms, then, confirms the idea that Farmer and Henley gained a greater focus as a result of their experience as they worked their way through the alphabet. They decided that vulgar terms should have only a limited place in it.

5. Cited authorities About 58% of entries in my main sample include cited authorities. The authorities cited are also usually quoted. Entries that do contain citations have an average of 3.2. This suggests a total of about 38,000 citations in all, rather short of Farmer’s “upwards of 100,000” quoted above. Table 9-5 shows the twelve most frequently cited authorities in my main sample.

Grose BE Shakespeare Matsell Jonson Lexicon balatronicum Dickens Mayhew New canting dictionary Scott Swift Thackeray

number of citations

% of citations

% of entries

135 99 61 42 33 31

5.8 4.3 2.6 1.8 1.4 1.3

10.7 7.8 4.8 3.3 2.6 2.5

% of entries containing citations 18.5 13.6 8.4 5.8 4.5 4.3

29 25 25

1.2 1.1 1.1

2.3 2.0 2.0

4.0 3.4 3.4

23 22 22

1.0 0.9 0.9

1.8 1.7 1.7

3.2 3.0 3.0

Table 9-5: Most frequently cited authorities in Slang and its analogues

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In all, dictionaries and glossaries are cited in 21.9% of entries; newspapers and periodicals in 10.8%. The other citations are largely from plays, novels, and poetry, following very much the OED practice of using literary citations as the basis for a study of the language.5 There are also variations in the distribution of citations through the course of the dictionary. Fig. 9-4 shows that between Volumes I and VI there is an increasing trend both in the proportion of entries including citations, and also in the number of citations included. In each case, there is a fall off in Volume VII, but the revised edition of Volume I returns to the upward trend in number of citations per entry, particularly in its new entries. 80%

5.0 4.5

70%

4.0 60% 3.5 50%

3.0

40%

2.5 2.0

30%

1.5 20% 1.0 10%

0.5

new entries in Vol. I, rev.

Vol. I, rev.

Vol. VII

Vol. VI

Vol. V

Vol. IV

Vol. III

Vol. II

0.0 Vol. I

0%

Fig. 9-4: Percentage of entries including citations (plain line, value axis on left) and average number of citations included per entry (dotted line, value axis on right) Different volumes use the most frequently cited sources in different proportions (for details, see Appendix 2 below, tables 9-10 to 9-12). When he was working alone on Volume I, Farmer tended to cite modern reference works, such as Hotten’s slang dictionary and Brewer’s Dictionary of phrase and fable. After Volume I, a more thorough and methodical approach towards consulting 5 Indeed, many of the citations are from the OED and from OED files (Farmer 1890, viii; Atkinson 2003, 5). I have yet to determine the degree of this dependency.

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earlier dictionaries developed, as shown in Fig. 9-5. This may be one of the contributions that Henley made to the work as it was being revised. BE

New Canting Dictionary

Grose

Lexicon

Hotten

Matsell

Brewer

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

0% Vol. I

Vol. II

Vol. III

Vol. IV

Vol. V

Vol. VI

Vol. VII

Vol. I, rev.

new entries in Vol. I, rev.

Fig. 9-5: Percentage of all citations in each volume from the most frequently cited dictionary sources Taken together as a proportion of all citations, there is a significant increase in reference to the Lexicon balatronicum, the New canting dictionary, and dictionaries by Grose, B. E., and Matsell between Volume I and II, and another between Volume III and IV. The New canting dictionary is not cited in my sample after Volume IV, and the Lexicon balatronicum and Matsell not after Volume V, perhaps because experience had demonstrated that they had little to add to B. E. and Grose, who were still frequently cited. Volume VII refers to B. E. and Grose significantly less often than Volume VI, and there is a further significant reduction in reference to them in the revised edition of Volume I (all p = 0.01). Fig. 9-6 shows the type of texts that supplied citations when dictionary sources were not being fully utilized. Farmer cited Shakespeare and the Bible very frequently in Volume I. This may have been to give the dictionary an air of respectability, or it may have been because the availability of concordances made them easily citeable. Conversely, it may have been felt that it was inappropriate to quote the Bible, particularly, in this context. Whatever the

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reason, the Bible does not appear again in my sample until the revised edition of Volume I, where it occurs even more frequently in new entries than in existing entries. This suggests that Farmer reverted to his original methods following Henley’s death in 1903. Bible

Shakespeare

Jonson

Dickens

Scott

Thackeray

20% 18% 16% 14% 12% 10% 8% 6% 4% 2% 0% Vol. I

Vol. II

Vol. III

Vol. IV

Vol. V

Vol. VI

Vol. VII

Vol. I, rev.

new entries in Vol. I, rev.

Fig. 9-6: Percentage of citations in each volume from the most frequently cited literary sources Comparison between the original edition of Volume I and the revised edition demonstrates that although more citations are included, they are more efficiently edited. Original edition of Vol I BACKHANDER, subs. (common). —I. A drink out of turn; also detention of wine at a table so as to get an extra share. 1855. THACKERY [sic], Newcomes, ch. xliii. ‘Thank you, Mr. Binnie, I will take a BACKHANDER, as Clive don’t seem to drink.’ 1873. Saturday Review, p.798. Long

Revised edition BACKHANDER, subs. phr. (common). —I. A glass of wine out of turn, the bottle being passed back or retained for a second glass instead of ‘following the sun’ round the table. Hence BACK-HAND (verb.) and BACKHANDING (subs.). 1855. THACKERAY, Newcomes, xliii. ‘Thank you, Mr. Binnie, I will take a

Expediency and Experience

Original edition of Vol I experience has shown us that to get small advantages over us gives the Scotch so much pleasure, that we should not think of grudging them the mild satisfaction, just as a kindly host affects not to notice a valued guest, who, he observes, always helps himself to an innocent BACKHANDER. 2. A blow on the face with the back of the hand. 1836. MARRYAT, Midshipman Easy, p. 11. ‘Go away, Sarah,’ said Johnny, with a BACKHANDER. 1862. FARRAR, St. Winifred’s, ch.xxxiii. He administered a BACKHANDER to Elgood, as he spoke, and the next minute Charlie, roused beyond all bearing, had knocked him down. 1870. MANSFIELD, School-Life at Winchester College. The doctor comes suddenly round a corner, and finds Tibbs [a fag] mopping the rosy fluid from his nose with a rueful countenance, having just received a sharp BACKHANDER from one of his lords and masters. 3. Hence, figuratively, a rebuke; a ‘setting down.’ 1856. WHYTE MELVILLE, Kate Coventry, ch. i. I knew this was what John calls a BACK HANDER at me, but I can be so good-natured when I have anything to gain, therefore I only said ————

151

Revised edition BACKHANDER, as Clive don’t seem to drink.’ 1857. LAWRENCE, Guy Livingstone, viii. Livingstone, if you begin BACKHANDING already, you’ll never be able to hold that great raking chestnut. 1873. Sat. Rev., 798. A kindly host affects not to notice a valued guest, who … helps himself to an innocent BACKHANDER. 2. (common) A blow on the face delivered with the back of the hand; hence an unexpected rebuff, a SETDOWN (q.v.). 1836. MARRYAT, Midshipman Easy, 11. ‘Go away, Sarah,’ said Johnny, with a BACKHANDER. c.1840. MANSFIELD, School-Life. The doctor … finds Tibbs mopping the rosy … with a rueful countenance, having just received a sharp BACKHANDER. 1856. WH. MELVILLE, Kate Coventry, i. This was … a BACK HANDER at me, but I … only said … Ibid. (1862), Inside Bar, x. This—was obviously a BACK-HANDER at James. 1862. FARRAR, St. Winifred’s, xxxiii. He administered a BACKHANDER to Elgood, … and the next minute Charlie … had knocked him down. 1880. World, 21 Aug., 7. The Lieutenant-General got a prompt BACK-HANDER when he asked for a return of the contributions. 1881. WORBOISE, Sissie, xxii. A heavy BACKHANDER by way of punishment.

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6. Grammatical Information About 72% of the entries in my main sample include grammatical information, but this figure obscures the difference between the way that first and subsequent entries under a headword are treated. 94% of first entries include grammatical information, while only 13% of second and subsequent entries do. Unless otherwise indicated, the reader is to infer that entries under the same headword belong to the same part of speech. Table 9-6 breaks down this grammatical information. first or only entry under a headword noun (phr) verb (phr) adj (phr) phrases, combinations and derivatives adv (phr) interjection affix proverb no grammatical information given total

535 201 52 48

57.5% 21.6% 5.6% 5.2%

second and subsequent entries 24 7.0% 9 2.6% 4 1.2% 6 1.8%

all entries

27 9 2 1 55

2.9% 1.0% 0.2% 0.1% 5.9%

3 0 0 0 296

0.9% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 86.5%

30 9 2 1 351

2.4% 0.7% 0.2% 0.1% 27.6%

930

100.0%

342

100.0%

1272

100.0%

559 210 56 54

43.9% 16.5% 4.4% 4.2%

Table 9-6: Grammatical information provided in Slang and its analogues The totals in Table 9-6 are not entirely comparable with those in Table 9-1, because a small number of entries are given more than one part of speech. For example: OBIQITOUS, adj. and adv. (American).—Innocence of right and wrong. [From oblivious and obliquity].

Some phrases are labelled specifically by their grammatical function, while other are grouped together with derivatives, compounds, or both, and this variety of treatment is reflected in Table 9-6. There are, of course, variations in the rates at which grammatical information is provided, but in this case only the first volume is out of line, both

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in its original and its revised form. In Volume I, 84% of first or only entries under a headword are provided with a grammatical label. From Volume II onwards, this rises to at least 95%. Volume I provides grammatical labels for 52% of second and subsequent entries under a headword, which drops to 2% in Volume II, rising slowly thereafter to a peak of 31% in Volume VI. What this suggests is that grammatical information was provided in a haphazard way in the first volume, but that thereafter a more systematic method was used, whereby the first entry under a headword was labelled, and following entries only labelled if they belonged to a different grammatical class. The increase in labelling of these subsequent entries towards the end of the dictionary demonstrates the lumping together of terms characteristic of the later volumes and mentioned above. The revised edition of Volume I reverts to the lower level of labelling for first and only entries found in the original edition, both in existing and new entries. first or only entry

second or subsequent entry

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

Fig. 9-7: The provision of grammatical information

new entries Vol. I revised

Vol. I, rev.

Vol. VII

Vol. VI

Vol. V

Vol. IV

Vol. III

Vol. II

Vol. I

0%

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7. Cross-references Despite the long period between the first and the last volumes, it is clear that Farmer had a plan for the overall structure of the dictionary, although it grew from the planned three volumes to five (Atkinson 2003, 4), because he crossreferences from volume I to headwords that were not published until fourteen years later, most strikingly to headwords including lists of synonyms. These cross-references are usually honoured, but the one from backdoor to usher is an exception. In my main sample there are 790 cross-references in total, which gives an average of about two cross-references for every three entries. In fact, many entries include more than one cross-reference, as shown in Table 9-7. As Fig. 98 shows, the proportion of entries including cross-references remains more or less constant throughout the course of the dictionary, with a range of only 6.2%. What does vary widely is the average number of cross-references provided. cross-references 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 >8

entries 758 356 105 29 5 5 4 0 1 2 1265

59.9% 28.1% 8.3% 2.3% 0.4% 0.4% 0.3% 0.0% 0.1% 0.2% 100%

Table 9-7: Number of cross-references per entry in Slang and its analogues The entry with the most cross-references in my main sample is under the headword in. It lists forty-six headwords in which the word in is also found: [For combinations see ALTITUDES; ARMS OF MORPHEUS; BAD WAY; BLUES; BOTTOM OF THE BAG; BUFF; BUNCH; CART; CLICK; CLOVER; CRACK; CROOK; CUPS; DEAD ERNEST; DIFFICULTY; HOLE; JIFFY; JUG; KISH; KNOW; LAVENDER; LIMBO; LIQUOR; LURCH; PATTER; POUND; PRINT; QUEER STREET; RAGS; RUNNING;

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SHAPE; SHELL; SKIFFLE; SLASH; STATE OF NATURE; STRAW; STRING; SUDS; SUN; SWIM; TIN-POT WAY; TOWN; TWINKLING; WATER; WIND; WRONG BOX, etc.]

Individual entries including such large numbers of cross-references are sufficient to explain the variant averages shown in Fig. 9-8. 50%

5

40%

4

30%

3

20%

2

10%

1

0% Vol. I

0 Vol. II

Vol. III

Vol. IV

Vol. V

Vol. VI

Vol. VII

Vol. I, rev.

new entries in Vol. I, rev.

Fig. 9-8: Percentage of entries including cross-references (plain line) and average number of cross-references in entries which include them (dotted line) The edited edition of Volume I reduces several full entries to crossreferences: Original edition of Vol I

Revised edition ABOUT RIGHT, adv. phr. (vulgar). —Correctly; to the purpose; ABOUT. See properly—general satisfaction on the part of the speaker EAST concerning a given thing or action. ’Arry sometimes varies the (Suppt.); locution by TER RIGHTS (q.v.). RIGHT; SIZE. 1850. F.E. SMEDLEY, Frank Fairleigh, ch. iv. ‘YOU’RE ABOUT

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Original edition of Vol I

Revised edition

RIGHT, there,

Mr. Lawless; you’re down to every move, I see, as usual. 1883. HAWLEY SMART, Hard Lines, ch. xxii. ‘I am afraid your schemes went a little awry yesterday,’ observed Mrs. Daventry … ‘YOU’RE ABOUT RIGHT; they did.’ ABOUT THE SIZE OF IT, adv. phr. (American). —I. An expression covering a wide field—assent, general satisfaction with, approval, etc. Synonymous with ABOUT RIGHT; O.K.; TER RIGHTS, etc. 2. Used also for ‘how’; ‘how much,’ etc.—a measure of quantity or quality. 1876 (?). JAMES GREENWOOD, New ‘Roughs’ Guide’ in ‘Odd People in Odd Places.’, Got no home, no wittles, and never a ’a’penny to buy none with. That’s ABOUT THE SIZE of how destitoot we are, sir. 1881. Punch, May 14, p. 228. SIR G[ORGIUS] M[IDAS] GOES IN FOR CULTURE. “Look ’ere, Clarke. ’Appy thought! I’ll make this little room the libery, you know; ’ave a lot o’ books. Mind you order me some.’ ‘Yes, Sir Gorgius. What sort of books shall I order?’ ‘Oh, the best, of course, with binding and all that to match!’ ‘Yes, Sir Gorgius, how many shall I order?’ ‘Well,-let me see,--suppose we say a couple o’ ’undred yards of ’em, hay? That’s ABOUT THE SIZE OF IT, I think.’ A number of phrases are listed at right, but about right is not one of them. At size the sense ‘Result; state; fact’ is listed, along with quotations including the phrases about the size of it and the size of it with the sense shown here.

8. Synonyms in English and other languages As with cross-references, some entries contain many synonyms in English, other languages, or both. Table 9-8 shows the number of synonyms from each language in the 1,265 sampled entries. The last column does not total the columns preceding it: it counts entries with synonyms from one or more languages, so an entry with synonyms from French and Italian will be counted only once in the last column.

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0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 >10

157

English

French

Italian

Sp./Port.

German

any language

1179 56 12 3 1 3 0 0 0 1 0 10 1265

1219 26 4 5 3 1 0 1 0 0 1 5 1265

1256 5 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1265

1257 3 2 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1265

1258 4 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1265

1152 67 17 6 3 6 0 2 1 0 0 11 1265

Table 9-8: Synonyms from English and other languages in Slang and its analogues In all, 657 synonyms are provided in the entries in my main sample, which would average at one every two entries if they were evenly distributed. This is far from the case, however. The entry for ladder, to mount a contains 110 synonyms, and that for cabbage-head contains 93. The entry for dairy contains a just about quotable fifty-eight: DAIRY, subs. (common).—The paps. TO AIR THE DAIRY = to expose the breast. ENGLISH SYNONYMS. Bubs or bubbies; charlies; blubber; butter-boxes; butterbags; berkeleys; cat-heads; diddies; globes; dugs; milk-walk; milk-shop; milky way; dumplings; udder (Browning); ‘Nature’s founts’; feeding bottles; ‘charms’; hemispheres; apple-dumpling shop; meat market; poonts; titties; cabman’s rests (rhyming); baby’s bottom. FRENCH SYNONYMS. Les avantages (familiar); l’avant-cœur (popular = the foreheart; as l’avant-bras = the fore-arm); l’avant-main; les avant-scènes (properly that goes before; the front of a stage); les avant-postes (literally, the outposts); l’oranger (popular = the orange-tree). Cf., des oranges sur l’étagère); les nénais or nénets (popular); deux œufs sur le plat (common); le monzu or mouzu (Old Cant); des blagues à tabac (popular = tobacco-pouches); des bessons (common = twins); une étagère or un étal (properly a butcher’s stall; étalage = goods exposed for sale; Cf. étaler sa marchandise = to wear a low-necked dress); la doublure de la pièce (popular); devant de gilet (popular: un gilet à la mode = well-developed paps); une livraison de bois devant sa porte (popular); le ragoût de la poitrine (ragoût = pleasure, poitrine = breast); la mapper-monde (popular: literally a map of the two hemispheres); les nichons (familiar); il y a du monde au

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balcon (said of one with large paps); les bossoirs (sailors’; gabarit sans bossoirs = thin or withered paps); les calebasses ( = gourds); les éclaireurs (popular: scouts); des gibasses (popular: skinny paps); des œufs sur la place d’armes (popular). GERMAN SYNONYM. Gleishaus (i.e., milk-house; Gleis = milk). ITALIAN SYNONYM. Tetta. SPANISH SYNONYMS. Balsopeto (m; properly = a large pouch carried near the breast; chiche or chichi (f; a Mexican vulgarism); pechera (f; also = a stomacher or frill on the bosom of a shirt).

As with most of the lexicographical features looked at so far, the synonyms from English and other languages are not evenly distributed throughout the dictionary. English

Other languages

16% 14% 12% 10% 8% 6% 4% 2% new entries in Vol. I, rev.

Vol. I, rev.

Vol. VII

Vol. VI

Vol. V

Vol. IV

Vol. III

Vol. II

Vol. I

0%

Fig. 9-9: The provision of synonyms in English and in other languages In this case, as shown by Fig. 9-9, a peak is reached in the second volume rather than the first, which demonstrates that this was one respect in which it took a little longer for the new more disciplined approach to take effect. The rise in entries including synonyms from English and from other languages in the second volume is statistically significant, as are the later peak in English synonyms in Volume V and in the revised edition of Volume I (all p = 0.01). The revised edition of Volume I is not statistically different from the original edition in its treatment of synonyms, whether taken as a whole or whether new entries are considered alone.

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9. Other lexicographical features Farmer and Henley provide only about 16% of their entries with etymologies. For instance: EAGLE-TAKERS, subs. (military).—The Eighty-Seventh Foot. [The title was gained at Barossa (1811), when it captured the eagle of the 8th French Light Infantry. Its colours also bear ‘the plume of the Prince of Wales’ and ‘the harp and crown,’ an eagle with a wreath of laurel.] It was also nicknamed ‘The Old Fogs’; also ‘The Faugh-a-Ballagh Boys,’ from Fag an bealac! = ‘Clear the Way,’ the regimental march, and the war-cry at Barossa.

However, Fig. 9-10 shows that the proportion of entries including etymologies fell through the course of the dictionary. etymologies

encyclopedic and anecdotal information

pronunciation

new entries in Vol. I, rev.

Vol. I, rev.

Vol. VII

Vol. VI

Vol. V

Vol. IV

Vol. III

Vol. II

Vol. I

50% 45% 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

Fig. 9-10: The provision of etymologies, discursive material, and indications of pronunciation In a letter written in 1902, Henley reminded Farmer that “the question of origins … should in no case be mooted in our work” (Atkinson 2003, 73), which indicates that the reduction in etymologies was a deliberate policy. The revised version of Volume I goes so far as to edit out some of the etymologies found in the original edition. A small number of entries provide anecdotal or encyclopaedic information. For example:

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X, TO TAKE ONE X (or LETTER X), verb. phr. (police).—To secure a violent prisoner: two constables firmly grasp the collar with one hand, the captive’s arm being drawn down and the hand forced backwards over the holding arms; in this position the prisoner’s arm is more easily broken than extricated.

Again, Fig. 9-10 indicates that the proportion of entries including encyclopaedic information fell after Volume I, and that the revised version of Volume I edited out some of this material from the original. The process can be seen here: Original edition of Volume I

Revised edition

ABANDANNAD, ABANDANNAAD, subs. (thieves’).—I. A nearly obsolete term to designate primarily a pickpocket, whose chief quarry is pocket handkerchiefs or bandannas; and, hence. 2. A petty thief, i.e., one whose depredations are regarded by the fraternity as not worth the risk incurred. Brewer writes down the word as a contraction of ‘a bandanna lad.’ With this derivation is connected the story of an incident said to have been a prime factor in the movement resulting in the passing of Sir Samuel Romilly’s Act for the abolition of capital punishment for highway robberies under 40s. value. Briefly told, it is that a footpad robbed a woman of a bandanna shawl, valued at 9d., an offence for which a notorious highwayman was hanged. Subsequently, however, he was proved to have been innocent, whereupon the fact of her mistaken accusation having done an innocent man to death so preyed upon the woman’s mind that she became raving mad. The incidents touched the public conscience, an agitation ensued, and the law was amended, as stated.

BANDANNAD (or ABANDANNAAD), subs. (thieves’).—I. A

handkerchief (or bandanna) thief. Hence (2) a petty thief. [BREWER: ‘A contraction (sic) of a bandanna lad.’]

The following are the only entries in my sample that include indications of pronunciation: A (vulgar) — [“ă” as in bat].—A common vulgarism in speaking for, (I) “have,” (2) “I,” (3) “he,” (4) “at,” (5) “on,” etc. It occurs in these connections for more

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than 300 years; all were used by Shakspeare, as well as by Beaumont and Fletcher and other writers of the Elizabethan period. XMAS, subs. (colloquial).—Christmas: frequently pronounced ‘eksmas.’ See Christmas.

In the first case, an accented letter is used to indicate pronunciation, along with a comparative word. In the second, the word is respelt to indicate its sound. Given that so few indications of pronunciation are provided, it is not surprising that no consistent system was developed.

10. Conclusions Noel Osselton discusses the effect of “alphabet fatigue” in his paper in this volume. Under normal circumstances it is impossible to do anything other than guess whether changes through the alphabet are caused by fatigue or experience. The revised edition of Volume I of Slang and its analogues is an indication of the dictionary that Farmer and Henley would have produced if they had started again. In other words, it is the product of experience. Where it bears out trends found in earlier volumes, we can confirm that they too are deliberate changes rather than the accidental results of exhaustion or of impatience to reach the end of the alphabet. Experience taught Farmer and Henley more efficient ways of presenting and structuring their entries. It gave them a sharper sense of what should and should not be included in terms of register: “vulgar,” dialect, and jargon terms were less welcome in the later volumes. The anecdotal and encyclopaedic entries of Volume I were replaced by terser, more efficient definitions. The desire to speculate about etymology was repressed. They learnt where most fruitfully to look for citations for their terms, and developed a systematic method for providing grammatical information. A little later than some of the other changes, they seem to have recognised that a comprehensive provision of comparative slang terms from other European languages was just not viable. English synonyms are also edited out of the revised edition of Volume I, but not to the same extent. There are no meaningful variations in the treatment of crossreferences, and these demonstrate that whatever work remained to be done on the detail of the dictionary, Farmer had its overall structure worked out from the start. The last volume of Slang and its analogues includes a frontispiece in memory of Henley (Atkinson 2003, xxv). His health was clearly failing while they worked on Volume VI, but his last letter to Farmer, including comments on revised entries for the letter A, was written only weeks before his death (Atkinson 2003, 63–7, 86, 94–5). Farmer claimed, in offering some of Henley’s

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notes for sale as souvenirs, that he had been working on the dictionary “till within ten days of his death” (Legman 1966, lix). There are, however, a number of respects in which new entries in the revised edition of Volume I indicate that Farmer was reverting to his old ways. He became less methodical in consulting his main dictionary sources, Grose and B. E., and began again to rely on the Bible and Shakespeare for his citations. He also became less careful to include grammatical information about the terms he added. These changes allow us to pinpoint exactly what Henley’s contribution to the dictionary was.

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Appendix 1 Volume:

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

I rev

labels indicating wide usage labels indicating falling usage dialects of the British Isles Australian & Colonial terms American naval, nautical, or military theatrical & showmen other occupational or professional slang school & university sporting slang slang cant venery vulgar other total

25

58

41

91

60

13

80

36

16

52

26

87

82

14

60

49

5

2

0

10

15

0

16

6

1

1

0

1

1

0

5

3

11 1

18 9

10 1

30 9

21 10

2 5

30 9

8 4

0

7

3

2

2

3

4

0

7

10

2

15

13

3

11

5

4 1 0 7 0 5 1 84

10 12 6 8 5 0 1 199

4 4 0 3 5 4 0 103

7 5 5 19 15 1 0 297

10 2 6 16 7 2 0 247

1 0 1 2 2 0 1 47

19 6 3 11 8 3 3 268

14 4 2 12 11 1 2 157

Table 9-9: raw numerical data underlying percentages presented in Table 9-3

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Appendix 2 Volume:

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

I, rev.

Grose BE Shakespeare Matsell Jonson Lexicon balatronicum Dickens Mayhew New canting dictionary Scott Thackeray Bible Brewer Hotten

1 0 8 0 0 0 1 0 0

12 1 5 8 4 7 8 3 2

8 10 7 1 5 2 4 5 4

32 28 12 19 5 20 5 4 19

44 31 13 14 9 2 4 7 0

12 5 3 0 1 0 4 2 0

26 24 13 0 9 0 3 4 0

9 2 12 0 1 0 7 0 0

new entries in I, rev. 3 1 9 0 1 0 5 0 0

1 2 4 2 2

6 6 1 1 0

2 0 0 0 0

3 3 1 0 0

5 5 0 0 0

2 2 0 1 0

4 4 1 0 1

3 3 6 0 0

3 2 4 0 0

Table 9-10: Number of citations from frequently cited sources in sample from each volume Volume:

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

I, rev.

Grose BE Shakespeare Matsell Jonson Lexicon balatronicum Dickens Mayhew New canting dictionary

1.1 0.0 9.1 0.0 0.0 0.0

4.5 0.4 1.9 3.0 1.5 2.6

4.4 5.5 3.8 0.5 2.7 1.1

6.2 5.5 2.3 3.7 1.0 3.9

7.0 5.0 2.1 2.2 1.4 0.3

7.7 3.2 1.9 0.0 0.6 0.0

5.3 4.9 2.6 0.0 1.8 0.0

2.3 0.5 3.1 0.0 0.3 0.0

new entries in I, rev. 1.2 0.4 3.5 0.0 0.4 0.0

1.1 0.0 0.0

3.0 1.1 0.8

2.2 2.7 2.2

1.0 0.8 3.7

0.6 1.1 0.0

2.6 1.3 0.0

0.6 0.8 0.0

1.8 0.0 0.0

2.0 0.0 0.0

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Volume:

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

I, rev.

Scott Thackeray Bible Brewer Hotten

1.1 2.3 4.5 2.3 2.3

2.3 2.3 0.4 0.4 0.0

1.1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

0.6 0.6 0.2 0.0 0.0

0.8 0.8 0.0 0.0 0.0

1.3 1.3 0.0 0.6 0.0

0.8 0.8 0.2 0.0 0.2

0.8 0.8 1.6 0.0 0.0

new entries in I, rev. 1.2 0.8 1.6 0.0 0.0

Table 9-11: Percentage of citations from frequently cited sources in sample from each volume Volume:

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

I, rev.

Grose BE Shakespeare Matsell Jonson Lexicon balatronicum Dickens Mayhew New canting dictionary Scott Thackeray Bible Brewer Hotten

1.0 0.0 8.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

5.9 0.5 2.4 3.9 2.0 3.4

8.0 10.0 7.0 1.0 5.0 2.0

11.9 10.4 4.5 7.1 1.9 7.4

17.4 12.3 5.1 5.5 3.6 0.8

22.2 9.3 5.6 0.0 1.9 0.0

9.2 8.5 4.6 0.0 3.2 0.0

4.4 1.0 5.9 0.0 0.5 0.0

new entries in I, rev. 2.7 0.9 8.0 0.0 0.9 0.0

1.0 0.0 0.0

3.9 1.5 1.0

4.0 5.0 4.0

1.9 1.5 7.1

1.6 2.8 0.0

7.4 3.7 0.0

1.1 1.4 0.0

3.4 0.0 0.0

4.5 0.0 0.0

1.0 2.0 4.0 2.0 2.0

2.9 2.9 0.5 0.5 0.0

2.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

1.1 1.1 0.4 0.0 0.0

2.0 2.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

3.7 3.7 0.0 1.9 0.0

1.4 1.4 0.4 0.0 0.4

1.5 1.5 2.9 0.0 0.0

2.7 1.8 3.6 0.0 0.0

Table 9-12: Percentage of entries illustrated with citations from frequently cited sources in sample from each volume

CHAPTER TEN THE GREAT UN- CRISIS: AN UNKNOWN EPISODE IN THE HISTORY OF THE OED PETER GILLIVER In April 1915, while hard at work compiling entries for the Oxford English Dictionary in the latter part of the letter T, James Murray was already beginning to think about un-. He and his team of assistants were due to move on to the letter U; the teams led by two of the other editors, Henry Bradley and Charles Onions, were still working on the letter S, while William Craigie had just started on V. It had long been clear that the task of dealing with the prefix un- was going to be uniquely difficult: not only was it productive on an unprecedented scale, but its position near the end of the alphabet had maximized the time during which materials could accumulate. In a letter to his son Wilfrid (quoted K. Murray 1977, 310–1), Murray wrote that he thought himself “more capable of tackling it with less un-preparedness and un-wisdom than any one else; but it will need skilful arrangement to keep the un-bounded prefix within bounds.” Within three months, however, Murray was dead, and his assistants were reassigned to the other editors rather than starting in earnest on the letter U, which instead was reallocated to Craigie’s team. The preliminary work of sorting the materials for the letter would have been carried out by assistants; Craigie himself is unlikely to have started work on U much before the spring of 1918, when the last copy for V finally went to press.1 The whole project was at this point seriously understaffed, with several assistants away on active service in France, or doing war work at the Admiralty, and Craigie's team could only

1

Information about the delivery of copy to the printers is derived from the datestamps found on the slips of paper on which the OED was compiled, which were dispatched to the typesetters in bundles, and which are held in the archives of Oxford University Press; for example, the bundle beginning with the entry for the word vraisemblance is stamped 26 March 1918. Material from the OUP archives, to which references are given, is reproduced by permission of the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press.

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start work in earnest on Un- in spring 1919. By July of that year the printers had taken delivery of copy as far as the word unattaint; but the scale of the material was already giving cause for concern. From an early stage the OED’s editors had compared the extent of the growing text with that of earlier dictionaries, in order to estimate the likely overall size of the Dictionary, which of course had implications in terms of time and cost. The most important yardstick was the 1864 edition of Webster’s Dictionary. From an original concept of something about four times the size of “1864 Webster,” the scale of the OED had remorselessly increased to a point where it was all the editors could do to stay within a limit of eight times Webster. In September 1919 Charles Cannan, the Secretary to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press and the man overseeing the work of the editors, received an alarming estimate of the work outstanding (PP/1919/13). The part of U now set up in type was 16 times the scale of the equivalent pages in Webster, and unspecifically looked as if it might be much worse: for the tiny range unappropriate to unattentive, which took up a quarter of one column in Webster, the OED proofs ran to 16 columns of type—representing an expansion factor of 64. Charles Cannan unfortunately died in December 1919, before he was able to take any action. He was succeeded as Secretary by Robert Chapman, who on 16 March 1920 received a progress report from Onions which showed that the scale of U (now in type as far as uncut) was now exceeding Webster by a factor of 18½. This was despite the fact that Craigie was already omitting a great deal of marginal material. Onions’ assessment at this point was that the expansion was largely due, not to the inclusion of too many words of negligible interest, but to excessively long entries for some of the more substantial words (PP/1920/4). Within a week Chapman had instructed the printer to stop making up any further printing plates (PP/1920/5), while he summoned Craigie to a meeting with some of the Delegates of the Press. Craigie was firmly of the view that the “historical principles” of the Dictionary had to be maintained throughout the entire text, and that this was bound to make un- particularly extensive—a fact which he had discussed at length with Chapman’s late predecessor. The fact that Chapman had actually been expecting a reduction in scale in un- (PP/1920/12) suggests that he had not been party to these discussions. However, just before the crisis meeting, Craigie dropped a bombshell. In a long letter (PP/1020/20) setting out the problems with U, which he thought would occupy him until autumn 1921, he announced that after that point he wished to cut back on his Dictionary work. His reasons were ostensibly fair enough: he had been finding it difficult to combine the work with his academic duties—he was, after all, Professor of Anglo-Saxon—and he was hoping to do something with the substantial materials he had collected for the study of the

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Scottish language. But from the timing it does look as though the differences of opinion over how to deal with un- had brought him dangerously close to losing patience with the whole enterprise. The meeting on 29 March evidently resulted in an undertaking from Craigie to do what he could to compress the text; Chapman reinforced this in another meeting in April, when it was agreed (PP/1920/27) that Craigie would cut down the material both at the proof stage, and also at the earlier stage when it existed only in the form of paper slips. Typesetting resumed, but Chapman also imposed a regime of close scrutiny on all three editorial teams: the scale compared to Webster was calculated for each batch of copy as it came into the printers, and composition was not allowed to proceed without his approval (PP/1920/28). But despite Craigie's efforts, the scale remained consistently worrying. He was well aware of the financial implications of allowing the Webster scale to exceed 12, but the task of keeping within this limit while preserving some sort of historical approach was becoming increasingly hopeless, as he reported to Chapman in May in a series of letters: (10 May) I am at a loss to know what can profitably be done to reduce the scale of Under-, which so far comes to an average of 16. ... [O]nly extensive omissions of minor words, or combination of distinct senses, can alter the situation appreciably. I have already omitted a considerable number of special terms which are treated at length in the American dictionaries, and I think it unadvisable to go very far in this direction. (PP/1920/45) (17 May) What follows [after understanding] in Webster presents the problem of Un- in its most intractable form. I enclose a comparative statement of the Dictionary material compared with 5 lines of Webster. I have reduced the Dictionary entries and quotations to a very low point, and the scale remains at about 48! ... It is obviously useless to send in any of this copy to the printers until the problem is settled. But on what lines can this be done? The prospect of sacrificing so much work already done, and beginning over again in order to produce something inferior in value, is not inviting. Your figures, however, show that something must be done. (PP/1920/62) (31 May) I have spent about a week in reducing a portion of U to the lowest limits of natural compression. This portion covers 1¼ columns in Webster; the reduced copy for the printers is sufficient to fill about 40 columns of the O.E.D., which gives a scale of 32. ... No reduction of the greater portion of U to a normal scale can be effected by ordinary methods of condensation. To bring it down even to a scale of 12 would imply the abandonment of principles which have been observed from the beginning of the dictionary, and would involve arbitrary selection of the words to be recorded and illustrated, as well as an imperfect presentation of the history of those included. The result of this would be to lower

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the standard of the dictionary in two ways. In the first place, it would be necessary ... to omit many words which are of minor importance, but are already recorded and illustrated in previous dictionaries. In the second, the Dictionary could no longer be regarded as a complete record of the language, and it would assuredly be felt that this portion of it was imperfect and unsatisfactory. ... (As an example of the difficulty of omitting even insignificant words, it may be mentioned that the passage containing Ruskin’s undisappointable has been sent in by five different readers. Lowell's undisprivacied (besides being recorded in the Century Dict.) is the subject of a long note in Fitzedward Hall’s “Modern English” and is specially mentioned by W. D. Howells in commenting on Lowell’s language.) ... At least two-thirds of the work required to prepare U for the printers has already been done. Strict reduction of the prepared copy to the lowest possible scale can be effected by a certain amount of time being spent on it; but to re-cast the main portion of it, so as to produce something like the normal scale of earlier letters, would involve additional labour and time to an extent which cannot easily be estimated. (PP/1920/62/4)

The last of these letters goes on to suggest that, as the main problem was one of expense, an appeal could be made for external funding. Craigie also gave another reason for seeking additional funds, namely the fact that he regarded the salaries being paid to himself and the other lexicographers as having become quite inadequate. Chapman circulated Craigie's comments to the Delegates, but added a long memorandum of his own (PP/1920/64/2), giving several examples of words in unc- where he felt that Craigie had been too expansive. His general assessment was that “The obvious view is that Un, as duplicating a large part of the rest of the alphabet, lends itself to condensed treatment.” The Delegates, meeting on 11 June, agreed, and resolved “not to press for any departure from the methods of the Dictionary, but to urge Dr. Craigie to keep Un- words within the narrowest possible limits (especially of quotations)” (Delegates’ Order Book 11 June 1920). Unfortunately, this “urging,” in the form in which it was communicated to Craigie, contained no practical suggestions as to how this was to be achieved. The most that Chapman could offer was a recommendation to make more use of comments like “(freq[uent] in 17[th] C[entury])” in place of banks of quotations (PP/1920/79/2)—a style which had in fact occasionally been used in Dictionary entries from Vol. I onwards. The Delegates’ meeting does at least seem to have been followed by a period of progress. There continued to be arguments about particular entries, but copy also continued to be sent to the printers for the rest of 1920, with ungraciousness being the last word passed to the printer on Christmas Eve. However, during December Craigie made a remarkable discovery about the 1864 edition of Webster’s Dictionary. While in most respects this was an expansion of the edition of 1847, in un- there had been a considerable reduction

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in the number of words covered. Barely 18 pages were given to un- in the 1864 text, compared with nearly 31 in the 1847 edition—no doubt as a result of the editors of Webster being pressured to condense their text, just as Chapman was pressuring Craigie. Such wholesale excision of un-words meant, in Craigie’s view, that 1864 Webster was not a fair basis of comparison; if, instead, Craigie were to use the 1847 edition, his scale for the part of un- that was now in type was more like 10 or 12 (PP/1920/145, 163). Chapman, however, was not going to let Craigie off the hook. Whether there were good reasons for it or not, the cost of averaging more than 20 times the scale of 1864 Webster would be ruinous. Not for the first time, Chapman tried to enlist the help of an independent but authoritative figure in bringing Craigie to heel. In January 1921 he wrote to Henry White, the Dean of Christ Church: Un. is full of nonce words, and you can make a hundred while you shave (Craigie alleges that he has left out far more than he has put in; but he has included uncusped because it is in Ruskin). ... On the merits of the case Onions (this for your very private ear) is entirely with us (Bradley wont give an opinion). ... I hope you will take a firm line. Craigie wont suspect You, as he doubtless suspects me, of being an enemy to research. (PP/1921/5)

A fortnight later White was among the Delegates who passed another unhelpfully general resolution, this time “to inform Dr Craigie that drastic reduction of the present scale of words in Un- is ... both necessary as an economy and desirable in itself” (Delegates’ Order Book 28 January 1921). They may have been further motivated to do this by the fact that all efforts to secure external funding had now come to nothing. Chapman must have wondered how all of this would go down with Craigie; but he can hardly have anticipated the response which he received, within a week of the Delegates’ resolution. Craigie had now actually reached the end of un-, as far as the first stage of editing was concerned, namely the preparation of bundles of slips, many of which were waiting to be sent to the printers; and Craigie expected that by July the whole of the letter U would be complete in slip form. At that point, he announced, he proposed to leave Oxford and spend a year going round the world. He had received invitations to give lectures in Romania, India, and the United States; even without his disenchantment with the difficulties of U, the end of the letter must have seemed an ideal point at which to take up these opportunities. Meanwhile, the transformation of the remainder of U into copy could wait until one or other of the editors—and the Press—had the stomach to continue with it. Chapman, for one, was keen to hand the rest of U over to “some more docile editor” (PP/1921/30). Craigie left Oxford in July 1921, having finished U in slip form as promised, and was absent for just over a year; two of his assistants also left the project in

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July. In October three sections of the Dictionary were published—the first for 18 months—including U–Unforeseeable; but with only one person left on Craigie's staff, little further progress could be made on un-. The other editors were further distracted by a different project: the “Abridged” dictionary (later renamed the Shorter OED), the editor of which, William Little, died in January 1922 after a long illness. Onions was persuaded to take over the project, which of course affected his team’s progress through their part of the letter W. On returning from his world tour Craigie did in fact resume editing, although in the first instance he only committed himself to do so for one year (Minutes of Finance Committee 28 September 1922). This lack of commitment may have had something to do with Craigie's ideas about the future. In October 1922 delivery of bundles of un- slips to the printers resumed; but at the same time Craigie drew up a memorandum for the Delegates (PP/1925/58), calling for the compilation of separate period dictionaries of Old, Middle, and Early Modern English, and Older Scottish—projects for which he had secured offers of help from some American university English departments. Craigie was evidently getting restless. In fact OUP was now nervous about the commitment of two of the three surviving editors. Quite apart from Craigie’s visions of the future, both he and Onions had academic obligations within the University. Both editors were asked for an estimate of how they planned to divide up their time, and Craigie was also asked for a reassessment of the question of scale; Onions obliged, but Craigie failed to provide any such information—and, in consequence, the Press decided that they could not yet recommence paying Craigie for his work (Minutes of Finance Committee 28 September, 12 October 1922). Nevertheless work on un- did continue during the autumn. In December 1922 Chapman reported to the Delegates that “Dr. Craigie is now correcting proofs of Un ... and it is hoped that an arrangement will be reached by which he will undertake at least to complete U” (PP/1922/61/2); but this turned out to be very optimistic. Within a month Chapman was confiding to a colleague that Craigie had not returned any corrected proofs since November, and was rumoured to have given up work on U altogether (PP/1923/6). At last, however, in March Craigie came up with both a new proposal about his remuneration, and some encouraging news on scale: he estimated that the scale from unforeseen to unlevel was “only” 15 times that of 1864 Webster (PP/1923/26). Unfortunately, although this appeared to set matters on an even keel once more, two months later progress was once again disrupted, this time by the unexpected death of Henry Bradley. The section of W on which he had been working now needed an editor to complete it, and neither Craigie nor Onions could take on the task. In the event it was decided that Bradley’s experienced assistant Walter Worrall should complete the section, with help from Craigie

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where necessary. The fact that this was apparently Craigie’s idea must have encouraged Chapman, who within days of Bradley’s death had privately expressed the hope that Craigie would now feel that the project needed him more than ever (PP/1923/49, 99, 103). Certainly work on un- seemed at last to be proceeding at a steady rate; this continued at least until the autumn of 1923, with copy for the word unpythagorically reaching the printers in September. Craigie was, however, soon having to turn his attention to Worrall’s editing of W. Months had gone by by with no further copy being sent to press after the last bundle edited by Bradley, and by February 1924, when it had become clear that Worrall was not coping, Craigie was obliged to take a hand (PP/1924/4). This of course had the effect of slowing his own progress through the end of un-, as did his departure during the summer of 1924 for Chicago, apparently to teach a summer school. An absence of several months was bound to affect progress, and this led to a bad-tempered dispute between Craigie and the Press over payment, which was not fully settled until November (Minutes of Finance Committee September-November 1924 passim); but by then, at last, the final bundle of copy for un- had gone to press. The completion of un- on slips, however, does not of course mark the end of the story. The production cycle for the OED involved two, and sometimes more, rounds of very heavy correction of proofs; it was in fact not until July 1926 that the section containing the end of un-, and the remainder of the letter U, was finally published. By this time Craigie was again in Chicago—and this time not merely for a visit. In October 1925, following another summer school, he had taken up the post of Professor in the University of Chicago’s English Department; the appointment seems to have been rather unusual, in that Craigie was given no lecturing commitments during his first academic year, but was instead expected to start work on two new historical dictionaries, one of Older Scottish, and another devoted to American English. It had evidently been agreed with OUP that he should return to Oxford during the summer vacations to work on the OED, and he also fitted in work on the Dictionary at other times: his Preface to the half-volume for the letter U is signed “Chicago, March, 1926.” We may now briefly consider the published text which resulted from Craigie’s long struggle to reconcile the Dictionary’s historical principles with OUP’s need to keep the project within practical limits. The half-volume for U ran to 493 pages, of which 380 were devoted to un-: over 20 times as many as in the 1864 edition of Webster (although, as Craigie would no doubt have wished to point out, compared to the 1847 edition the factor was more like 12). An obvious question, given the unprecedented length of this text, is: how well had Craigie used the space? This breaks down into two questions: was his method for choosing which words to include satisfactory, and did he allocate space wisely to those words?

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To take the first of these: no detailed account survives of Craigie’s selection process—in fact it may never have been written down—but a certain amount can be deduced from a few comments in the main entry for un-, and from the OED’s files of rejected material. The definition of sense 7, for example (see Figure 10-1 below), includes a comment that, of the “less usual or permanent” words formed from un- and an adjective, examples included are “restricted to such as are recorded before 1890, and could be indefinitely increased by the addition of later or less noteworthy material.” Craigie uses the same limit of 1890 at other points in the entry; and corresponding to this I have found in the OUP archives a bundle of evidence for words which Craigie omitted, very nearly all of which consists of singleton quotations dating from 1890 or later. The forty or so words in this bundle which begin with una- are listed in Table 10-1. Word un-abbess-like unacclaimed unachieving unactualized unaddiced unadjustable unadjustment unadministrable unadmiralled unadornable unaesthetized (may be an error for anaesthetized) un-African unairworthy unaisled unalcoholic unaltruism unamazing unanalysing unanarchical unanimal unantlered unappeasing unapplauding

Date(s) of quotations 1907 1906, 1909 1901 1899 1902 1908 1899 1904, 1905 1905 1905 1900

Added to Supplement?

1906 1900, 1907 1912 1907, 1909 1911 1902 1915 1893 1902 × 2 1895 ?1908 1900, 1901

YES YES

YES YES

1986

174

Word unapproximated unarable unarchaic unarmigerous unarresting unascetic unasepticized unassayable unassessable unassumption unasterisked unatmospheric unattainment unattributed unautobiographical unavaricious unawaited-for

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Date(s) of quotations 1899 1767 1892, 1904 1902 1893 1867 1916 × 2 1909 1909, 1914 1898 1904 1901, 1903 1906 1899 1852-62 1904 1898

Added to Supplement?

1986

YES

YES YES

Table 10-1: Words in una- omitted by Craigie, with dates of quotations available to him Of course, exceptions could be made for a word illustrated only from 1890 or later if it satisfied other criteria. For example, having decided to make an entry for the adjective undesirable, Craigie evidently decided that he could slip in the adverb undesirably even though he seems only to have had an 1890s quotation for it; on a similar basis he added unaggressively alongside unaggressive, and unburstable alongside unburst. There were no doubt other criteria, but at this remove I have not been able to recover them. Not that I would wish to argue with the decision to include, for example, uncashed, uncensored, uncoordinated, and unsupervised, even though each of these appears with a single 1890s quotation (and of course Craigie may in each case have had more evidence than he printed: this happened, for example, with unavian, for which only one 1890 quotation is printed but for which I found another of 1893 among the rejected slips). Conversely, looking at the list of omitted una- words, I would say that in almost all cases Craigie's identification of these words as “omittable” has stood the test of time; the few exceptions really only show how difficult it is to assess such marginal evidence. Moreover, he knew that if a particular omission proved in time to have been unwise, then this could be rectified in the Supplement to the Dictionary. (In the event none of the words

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shown in Table 10-1 were added in the 1933 Supplement; but several— including, in my view, all the most significant ones—did appear in the later revised Supplement edited by Robert Burchfield, the relevant volume of which was published in 1986.) Craigie also omitted another category of words, namely those listed by some earlier dictionaries but for which he knew of no contextual evidence. Some of these were nevertheless listed in the entry for un-, as may be seen in Figure 101; similar comments occur elsewhere in the OED. Evidently the editors wished to contrast these apparently artificially inflated lists with the OED’s evidencebased lemmas.

Fig. 10-1: OED1 entry for un-1, beginning of sense 7

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The second question, namely how well Craigie allocated space to the words he did include, is too complex to address fully here, but there is one highly innovative feature of the text which merits particular scrutiny. Craigie already had at his disposal a very compact style for presenting the less substantial formations of a prefix like un-: a single bank of quotations arranged alphabetically, with asterisks to guide the eye to the first quotation for each lemma. This method has the disadvantage that in order to look up a particular word, it is necessary to work out which sense of the prefix is being used. The difficulty of finding un-words would be increased further by Craigie's division of un- into two distinct prefixes: un-1, representing “negation” (as in unkind), and un-2, representing “reversal or deprivation” (as in unlock). Craigie was anxious to maximize the number of un-words appearing in the main alphabetical sequence, rather than as sublemmas within the prefix entries, but without compromising too much on space. This led to his devising a new condensed style for relatively unimportant words: the first significant typographical innovation since the earliest days of James Murray's editorship.

Figure 10-2: OED1 entries for words in unrep-, showing condensed style

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Figure 10-2 illustrates how words in this category were presented: in small type—not the Clarendon type which had always been used for headwords until now—with a brief reference to the relevant sense number for un-, and no definition, and any quotations run on without a line break; if two or more such lemmas lay next to one another then even these abbreviated entries could be run on, forming a single paragraph. As can be seen, the new style was extremely condensed compared to the “full entry” style; in fact Craigie was so taken with its combination of compactness and “findability” that he used it again for words beginning with up-. (Walter Worrall also used it, no doubt on Craigie’s advice, for the very large number of compounds of well which he found himself dealing with following the death of Bradley.) It is only fair to say that these words could have been accommodated still more compactly as sublemmas, but Craigie no doubt felt that the improved “findability” of the lemmas justified the small amount of extra space used. In a sense, however, to focus on such matters as typography and the inclusion of marginal vocabulary is to overlook what is arguably Craigie’s greatest achievement in his work on un- and its formations, namely that of simply finishing the task. Not only was the accumulated body of evidence unprecedented in terms of sheer quantity: it also presented in its most intractable form the conflict between lexicographical ideals and publishing practicalities with which the OED’s editors had struggled from the start. As publication of the First Edition of the Dictionary drew to a close Craigie was surely right to uphold its historical principles throughout, notwithstanding the crisis (or series of crises) which this precipitated, which does seem to have been a key factor in his becoming disillusioned with (and eventually semi-detached from) the project. It is, moreover, no mean feat to have identified, even at this late stage, new opportunities for innovation, without departing from these principles.

CHAPTER ELEVEN IDIOMS IN JOURNALESE: A SYNCHRONIC AND DIACHRONIC STUDY OF FOOD AND DRINK IDIOMS IN 200 YEARS OF THE TIMES LAURA PINNAVAIA 1. Introduction In conclusion to his statistical research carried out in 1996 on 50,000 tokens in the Birmingham collection of English texts, Henk Barkema (1996b, 81) wrote “it is safe to observe that the hypothesis that the flexibility characteristics of a lexicalized expression are independent of the way in which it is used, is sufficiently falsified.” In other words, after due analysis of idiomatic noun phrases (to which his research was limited), Barkema observed that syntactic variation is not a chance occurrence but follows a systematic pattern dependent upon an idiom’s base structure, its function and the medium carrying it: findings that have since then begun to shed new light on the topic of idiom flexibility. In fact up until the end of the last century idioms were, in the field of linguistics, a subject matter for lexicographers alone, who would go about registering them individually and accounting for their syntactic structures separately. More recent works dedicated to the syntactic flexibility of idiomatic structures (see, for example, Barkema 1994a, 1994b, 1996a, 1996b; Coffey 2001; Langlotz 2001; Moon 1994, 1998a, 1998b, 2001; Pinnavaia 2000; Veisberg 2001), have led to the more recent and adequate hypothesis that the syntactic transformations idioms undergo can actually recur according to their traditional base structures and their contexts of use, consequently extending the applied areas of linguistic studies that nowadays treat idioms from lexicography to the writing of grammar handbooks.1

1

The growing focus of grammarians on the phraseological component of language is reflected in the 1999 publication of The Longman grammar of spoken and written English that features the form and function of recurrent expressions based on data

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In the light of this new postulation the desire to examine further the possible correlation between the syntactic behaviour of idioms and their semantic configuration in one particular medium became the contingent motive for the present article focused on the syntactic and semantic analysis of food and drink idioms appearing in articles published in The Times newspaper between the years 1785 and 1992: one medium—journalistic prose—that is renowned for its customary use of figurative expressions. On a more extensive scale, however, this article falls within the boundaries of a much larger research project that is in progress and intends to investigate the theoretical and descriptive areas of idiomatic expressions in more general terms. More precisely, this article aims to provide corroborative data to a project that will focus on a selection of idiomatic expressions regarding food and drink (cf Pinnavaia 2002 and Pinnavaia forthcoming) that will be analyzed, first, in a range of English monolingual lexicographical works registering them through the centuries—from Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 right up to the latest dictionaries issued by such publishers as Oxford, Collins and Longman—and, second, in a variety of written and spoken texts hosting them in habitual contexts of use. The purpose of such a project is eventually to provide a lexicographical and a lexicological description of such expressions both in synchrony and in diachrony. Only in view of this full project can the decision to use a historical corpus be explained: besides the synchronic information, this article also aims to provide some initial diachronic information as to the relationship between idiom use and textual genre.

2. Methodology The lexical search for idiomatic expressions regarding food and drink was carried out on 12,346 articles published in The Times newspaper starting from the year 1785 right up to 1992 and gathered in a recent historical corpus of broadsheet journalistic prose (Changing Times 1993) that is characterized by the scope and tenor of the political and social events reported, events that shaped the history of Britain and the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 For the selection of the food and drink lexemes to undergo examination, an awareness of the food and drink items consumed in England was firstly deemed necessary and consequently retrieved from Drummond-Wilbraham 1958. A further analysis was successively carried out in the Oxford English Dictionary retrieved from corpora analyses of the English language (for a review of this grammar book see Prat Zagrebelsky 2001). 2 The themes dealt with are: Trade and Industry, The Great War, The Irish Question, The British Empire, The Second World War, The French Revolution, The Rise of Communism, The Rise of America, Moving European Boundaries, Women’s Rights, World Conflicts, Special Events and the Times through History.

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(online) to ascertain that the lexemes chosen have been in use in English since the eighteenth century, the century in which the very first articles in this corpus of The Times were published. A final screening was applied in order to choose the lexical terms that have quantitatively and qualitatively generated the majority of idioms used in the English language in the last two centuries. The final 68 lexemes chosen were apple, bacon, banana, bean, beer, beetroot, bread, bun, butter, cake, carrot, cauliflower, cheese, cherry, cream, crumb, cucumber, egg, fat, fig, ginger, gingerbread, gooseberry, grape, gravy, ham, honey, jam, juice, lemon, loaf, meat, milk, mincemeat, mushroom, mustard, mutton, nut, onions, orange, pancake, parsnip, pea, peach, peanut, pepper, pickle, pie, plum, porridge, potage, potato, prune, pudding, pumpkin, raspberry, salad, salami, salt, sauce, soup, spaghetti, sugar, syrup, tea, toffee, tripe, wine. The collection of idioms from The Times was then obtained by typing each of these lexical items into the program, and by finding the item in each of the articles selected and distinguishing its idiomatic uses from its literal ones. The most ample definition for idiom was accepted: any saying, proverb, binomial, tournure phrase, simile, phrasal compound, or formula expression, or in Rosamund Moon’s words “a non-compositional, metaphorical expression consisting of two or more words” (Moon 2001, 229). Metaphoric uses of single items were not considered (e.g. to mushroom, to pepper), and neither were expressions that were originally idiomatic but have now acquired purely denotational meanings (e.g. sandwich man, sandwich courses). Once retrieved, the idiomatic expressions were analyzed from a syntactic and semantic point of view in relation to their context of use.

3. Results The data collected from the research was successively examined from both a quantitative and qualitative point of view. As to the quantitative features reported, focus was placed prevalently on the number and type of idioms found in the articles belonging to the corpus. As to the qualitative features, focus was first placed on the principal syntactic variations manifested by the most frequent idioms, and secondly on their semantic functions.

3.1. The number and type of idioms From a quantitative perspective three main aspects are worthy of being reported. The first is that out of the 68 lexemes looked up in the whole corpus, more than half were found to appear within one popular idiomatic structure, with some providing even more than one familiar expression. These, for identification purposes, have been reported in the list below according to the

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standard structures registered in reference works such as E. Brewer (2001), Cowie and Mackin (1985), and Gulland et al. (1986), even though, as will be seen, most of these structures manifest in their individual occurrences different sorts of morphosyntactic variations. Here is the full list of the lexemes, each followed by the traditional structure of the idiomatic expression or expressions found in the corpus: Apple: be the apple of one’s eye; be the apple of discord; bad /rotten apple. Banana: a banana republic. Beans: spill the beans. Beer: small beer. Bread: take the bread out of someone’s mouth; cast one’s bread upon the waters; man cannot live on bread alone; earn one’s daily bread; bread and circuses. Butter: earn one’s bread and butter. Cake: you can’t have your cake and eat it. Carrot: the carrot and the stick. Cheese: big cheese. Cherry: take two bites at a cherry. Cream: the cream of something. Crumb: a crumb of comfort. Egg: a bad egg, a curate’s egg. Fat: live on/off the fat of the land. Fig: not care a fig for; in full fig. Ginger: ginger up, ginger group. Grapes: sour grapes. Honey: be as sweet as honey. Jam: it’s jam tomorrow; jam yesterday; but never jam today. Juice: stew in one’s own juice. Loaf: half a loaf is better than no bread/none. Meat: there’s a lot of meat in it; strong meat; meat and drink. Milk: a land of milk and honey; mother’s milk; milk and water. Mincemeat: make mincemeat out of someone. Mutton: be as dead as a mutton. Nut: a hard nut to crack; be nuts; in a nutshell. Orange: a squeezed orange. Parsnip: soft words butter no parsnips. Pea: be as like as two peas. Pie: have a finger in every pie; eat humble pie, as American as apple pie. Plum: a plum role/job. Potato: small potatoes. Pudding: the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Pumpkin: the pumpkin has not turned into the coach. Salami: salami tactics. Salt: the salt of the earth; with a grain/pinch of salt; an old salt; rub salt into one’s wounds; (not) be worth one’s salt.

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Secondly, as regards the numerical relationship between idiom use and articles examined, it was noted that the idioms do not appear in the whole 1785– 1992 range but only in the span of 167 years, starting from the year 1820 and ending in the year 1987, with certain years and events being more stimulating than others, thus encouraging the use of both different idioms as well as the use of the same idiom in different articles on the same subject. For example, in 1887 eight articles, all on Parnell and Ireland, include seven different expressions in each article plus one recurring expression in two articles for a total of eight idioms (in a nutshell, bread and butter, stew in one’s own juice (found in two articles), all the fat in the land, have one’s cake and eat it, not care a fig, earn one’s daily bread). Another highly motivating period is that around the First World War: in the year 1915 seven articles dealing with this war employ seven different idioms (sour grapes, soothing syrup, earn one’s daily bread, make mincemeat out of someone, be as sweet as honey, rub salt into one’s wounds, soft words butter no parsnips); in 1917 there are six articles with five different idioms (a land of milk and honey (found in two articles), live off the fat of the land, to cast one’s bread upon the waters, not care a fig, grain of salt); and in 1918 there are nine articles with six different idiomatic expressions included (live off the fat of the land (found in two articles), be worth one’s salt (found in two articles), it’s jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never jam today, mother’s milk, take bread out of someone’s mouth, to stew in one’s own juice, salt of the earth). The Second World War is another topic that encourages figurative language: in 1941 six articles refer to three different idiomatic forms (bread and circuses (found in two articles), be a bad apple, earn one’s daily bread (found in two articles), earn one’s bread and butter), while 1942 offers three different idioms in five articles (have one’s cake and eat it, a hard nut to crack (used in three articles), soothing syrup). Five articles dealing with America and its foreign policy published in 1963 and 1969 are also enriched with different idiomatic expressions, the former includes the four idioms in a nutshell, live on bread alone (used in two articles), earn one’s bread, carrot and stick), the latter the four idioms carrot and stick, be worth one’s salt (found in two articles), read the tea leaves, old wine in new bottles. More miscellaneous are instead the subject matters supported by idiomatic expressions in more recent articles: quite fruitful appear to be the years 1973, with four articles and four different idioms (half a loaf is better than none, a hard nut to crack, salami tactics, the cream of something); 1977, with three articles and three idioms (as American as apple

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pie, a plum role, a piece of humble pie); 1981, with five articles and five idioms (there’s a lot of meat, bread and circuses, a bad egg, spill the beans, to live off the fat of the land); 1982, with four articles and four idioms (a bad egg, earn one’s bread, with a pinch of salt, strong meat); and 1986, with three articles and three idioms (a curate’s egg, be as dead as mutton, small potatoes). Besides the number of idioms and their use in the articles examined, the analysis thirdly showed that the lexemes found to contribute most decisively with 123 idioms out of a total of 235 found in the corpus were apple (9 occurrences), bread (34 occurrences), butter (7 occurrences), carrot (8 occurrences), cream (7 occurrences), fat (11 occurrences), juice (7 occurrences), milk (8 occurrences), nut (19 occurrences), salt (16 occurrences) and wine (7 occurrences), with the following idioms prevailing for each respective lexeme: the apple of one’s eye; to earn one’s daily bread; earn one’s bread and butter; the carrot and the stick; the cream of something; live off the fat of the land; stew in one’s own juice, the land of milk and honey; a hard nut to crack and in a nutshell; not worth one’s salt and the salt of the earth; old wine in new bottles. To try and explain these results, and more precisely the correlation between the number and type of idioms found and the date and theme of the article in which they appear, it may be easier to start from the third piece of information provided. Looking at the lexemes that are, in this corpus, the most productive in idiomatic terms, it could be claimed that they are on the whole the “best examples or prototypes” (Cruse 2000, 132) of their western European conceptual categories (on a statistical basis, apple tends to be the prototype for the fruit category, carrot for the vegetable category, butter, milk, and cream for the dairy category, salt for the spices category and wine for the alcoholic drinks category). Their essential nature in everyday western life has made such items the targets of a series of imaginative expressions that have become conventional and part of a western way of thinking and acting, some right from very early times: the majority of the idioms that derive from these lexemes and that were found in The Times corpus have in fact biblical origins. The socially and culturally wise messages that such idioms carry have in turn made them popular and consequently facilitated their being exploited by writers over the centuries, and by journalists in our more recent history, in order to obtain different perlocutionary effects of the striking, cajoling, or entertaining kind. Since its onset, the purpose of journalistic prose has in fact changed significantly; created to promote political views in the eighteenth century and to convey news in general in the nineteenth century, journalistic prose in the twentieth century has as much an entertaining and conative function as a referential one. This may explain why so few articles in the corpus host idioms in the nineteenth century, while the majority of articles with idiomatic expressions are published in the twentieth century, and why the idioms are used

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in relation to themes that are so controversial, such as war, famine, and power. Such provocative themes cannot but call for journalists’ opinions, that can rather effectively be conveyed by means of well-known expressions and their manipulation.

3.2. The syntactic variations of the idiom structures A close syntactic examination of the idiom structures appearing in the corpus did in fact reveal a conspicuous degree of flexibility. Recurring syntactic patterns were recognized at phrase, clause, and sentence level. 3.2.1. Phrase level variations At the level of the phrase the variations are numerous and are fundamentally represented by the addition or substitution of lexical items. As far as additions are concerned, the noun phrase may be premodified by adjectives: Yet Shaitan had had her little crumb of comfort ere the end. (“Destroyers at Jutland,” 1916)

It may be postmodified by prepositional phrases: they must vote on one side or the other and each party is thus compelled in turn to stew in the juice of Parnellism. (“Parnellism and crime,” 1887)

It may be premodified and postmodified: He wanted in The Times not just the red meat of politics, but also polo and California, Caruso and the season, nuts and flappers, and articles to interest even women—if you assume women are interested in different things from men. (“Votes for Women,” 1932)

Moreover. within the noun phrase, adjectives may be substituted: The approaching centenary of Bismarck has caused much heart-searching—even among those who are inclined to swallow the stimulating syrup administered by the German Press Bureau. (“Truth reaching Germany,” 1915)

They may be inverted: Mr. Bruce said after today’s meeting that the proposals were “old wine in new bottles.” (“Vietcong offer on ending war fails to impress US,” 1969)

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They may be graded: GÖRING, the hardest nut of all to crack, retains much power and some popularity. (“Walls within walls,” 1943)

They may even be substituted and graded: When the enemy commander realized that Bir Hakeim was a much tougher nut than he had expected. (“Bir Hakeim Garrison rescued,” 1942)

Fewer are instead the instances in which lexical items belonging to the noun phrase are deleted: All kinds of administrative and engineering economies were put in force, and soon the company was in a position of taking in money and paying nothing out— in other words, as Mr. Ford put it: “it was like living on its own fat.” (“Great Financial Fight,” 1921)

Verb phrases are pre- and postmodified by adverbials: If this is so, the settlement of October 16 is really a victory for Trotsky and his colleagues, who publicly ate humble pie. (“Soviet Leaders’ quarrel,” 1926) Now, as official historian of British intelligence in the Second World War, Professor Hinsley is spilling the beans at great length. (“History of British intelligence,” 1981)

They may also be altered in tense and polarity: And the sentiment of the streets was attune [sic] with the scene within Guildhall. This good wine needed no bush. (“Field-Marshal Foch,” 1919). This was of course just “his cup of tea.” (“Defeat of the Wehrmacht,” 1947)

3.2.2. Clause level variations Variations at clause level result mainly in the addition of a coordinating clause: And it is no use people writing to us and saying “you knew what it was like before you went there”. We didn’t. The proof of that piece of pudding lies definitely in the eating and digesting! (“Women can take the lead in making Parliament more efficient,” 1975)

They may also result in the inversion of clauses:

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Nor were the voters invited to consider the economic implications of the programme advocated by both of a large expansion of America’s foreign trade. Election pronouncements are generally flavoured by a human desire to eat the cake as well as to have it; and an American presidential campaign rarely provides many exceptions to this rule. (“The Fourth Term,” 1944)

3.2.3. Sentence level variations Undoubtedly interesting are the idiomatic structures found to have been manipulated at the level of the whole sentence. By the application of a combination of additions, deletions, permutations, or substitutions, new expressions have been created whose links with the original traditional structure range from the tight to the relatively loose. Already Nehru, his young rival in the Indian Congress, is preparing to supersede him the moment that the last drop has been squeezed from the British lemon. (“The Future of India,” 1931)

In this first example, the base idiomatic structure squeeze an orange has been passivized and the lexical item orange replaced by lemon, with the possible intent of recalling the familiar use of lemon to signify someone or something that is useless or defective. In the following example, the standard idiom the pumpkin has not turned into a coach has not only been enriched by means of extensive pre-and postmodification at phrase level but its normal negative polarity has been turned positive: At first he [McCarthy] had to dominate sub-committees of which he was not even a member but upon which, by a courtesy which he did not allow to influence his own conduct, he was permitted to sit in; then he got his chairmanship; then this same sub-committee, as a result of a transformation scene as spectacular as any in pantomime, turned itself from a peculiarly poisonous pumpkin into a golden coach of truth and carried him off not to a ball but to rejection and obscurity. (“McCarthy: The years of the ‘multiple untruth,’” 1974)

Looser still are those expressions deriving from traditional structures whose force seems to be above all inspirational: In the choice of MR. HAROLD WILSON to be President of the Board of Trade and in the Cabinet at the age of thirty-one the PRIME MINISTER has paid a proper tribute to youthful promise. Now the test of both the latest changes and of others still to be announced will be what they imply in terms of policy. New wine is needed, not only new bottles. If these adjustments merely register a series of compromises on the main issues of contention inside the Cabinet—on steel and

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coal, financial policy, and the armed forces—matters will be made worse, not better. (“Economic Planning,” 1947)

In the example above, the idiom new wine in old bottles has been extended by means of two coordinating clauses and has had its premodifying adjective old substituted, while in the following expression there has been a complete rearrangement of the well-known don’t count your chickens before they are hatched accompanied by the introduction of the headword egg: You can’t introduce anything into the egg before it is hatched! But you can transform the ordinary chicken into an infant canary when once born, and so paint it and pluck it afterwards as to become a monstrous lie! That’s what history does! (“Lord Fisher on the Navy,” 1919)

Almost unrecognizable is, instead, the following figurative expression whose structure is possibly the outcome of a combination of the idiomatic expressions a hot potato and sow the seeds of something, where the emphasis on the growth of the potato underscores Ireland’s agricultural tradition and misery and its burden on the British economy: To-night the Commons go into committee on the Poor Relief Bill. But neither this night, nor this week, nor this month, can bound the still increasing dimensions of Irish wants. The seed of the potato has germinated into an upastree3 of awful and fatal shade. We complain not of this. We taunt not the unhappy with the misery which throws collateral consequences on ourselves. We are willing to bear out just and due proportion of burdens made necessary by the condition of the empire. (“Parliamentary debate on Irish Economy,” 1847)

What is worth noting then in this restricted syntactic presentation is that the variations, which in Barkema’s (1996a) descriptive model are punctually defined as additions, deletions, permutations, and substitutions, occur in this corpus of idiomatic structures not only at various degrees but more importantly at all the three levels of syntax—the phrase, the clause, and the sentence— producing noteworthy differences in the message conveyed. While changes at the level of the phrase may simply make the meaning of the idiomatic expression more or less articulated, and while changes at the level of clause may modify the perspective more radically without necessarily changing the original figurative meaning, in the case of alterations at the level of the sentence, it 3

“A fabulous tree alleged to have existed in Java ... with properties so poisonous as to destroy all animal and vegetable life to a distance of fifteen or sixteen miles around it. The history of the fable is fully traced in Yule and Burnell’s Hobson-Jobson” (OED s.v. Upas).

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would appear that the message of the new expression becomes more twisted, involved, complicated—and thus obviously harder to decode.

3.3. The semantic function of the syntactic variations Regardless of how near or distant the syntactic layout is in relation to the original idiom, what all the idiomatic expressions found in this corpus have in common is a prevalent ideational function. Introduced by Halliday (1973, 1985) to describe the macro-function of language realized through the clause and concerned with articulating the speaker’s or writer’s experience of the world, this term and related concept is suitable for describing these idioms because it serves to identify expressions that are high in information value, or in Chitra Fernando’s words (1996, 107) are “complex packages of information.” Looking at the idioms retrieved, it is quite evident that they are all expressions of human thoughts, opinions, or feelings in the light of observations resulting from centuries of experience. These idioms are expressions that convey much in a limited and recognized structure, allowing the language-user to make an important statement that would otherwise be too longwinded if it were made using a paraphrasal equivalent. By means of idiomatic expressions, abstract ideas, especially, are in fact more easily comprehended: the complicated concepts of survival, honorability, or transformation, for example, are immediately grasped by means of the respective idioms daily bread, worth one’s salt, and new wine in old bottles, and this is because the images such idioms create convey a more sensational and spectacular message than equivalent words would do. After all, the imagery created by idioms reflects “the compromise effected by language-users to gain the advantages of the general without sacrificing those of the particular” (Fernando 1996, 151), and this is particularly true when idioms undergo morphosyntactic variations. By transforming the image through the operations of addition, deletion, substitution, and permutation, the conventional meaning is varied, adding to the interpretative effort on the part of the addressee and consequently to the idiom’s informational load. Examining the four types of syntactic variations at all levels, it is possible to distinguish certain semantic constants. In the cases of addition, the information load is clearly made more specific to fit the subject matter being discussed. This can be seen in all the instances quoted above as well as in this following quotation: They cannot be talking about the women. I know, about the 30,000 or so who write to me every year. They are, I imagine, talking about the tiny elite group of women—the thin layer of rich cream at the top of the bottle—who have career

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fulfillment and a new role whatever that is) and expectations of being a leader. (“A Year of Propaganda that will do nothing for ‘mere’ women,” 1975)

The enrichment of the idiom to be the cream of makes the rarity of such women even more evident. In the cases of substitution, the new message contrasts with the generally held one. In the example “Khrushchev is a tough egg, and understands tough talk” (“Inside Russia,” 1957), the Russian leader, with a negative reputation, is not described as being bad but rather as being tough. In contrast to addition, deletion paradoxically extends the information load by highlighting the main idea being conveyed. One idiom that frequently seems to undergo this type of variation is the fat of the land, frequently reduced to fat in this corpus, as shown by the following quotation: All kinds of administrative and engineering economies were put in force, and soon the company was in a position of taking in money and paying nothing out— in other words, as Mr. Ford put it: “It was like living on its own fat.” (“Great Financial Fight,” 1921)

By deleting of the land, this idiom, can, first of all, fit more conveniently into the syntactic structure of the text, and, secondly, address its meaning more succinctly and thus more directly too. Lastly, permutation allows the language-user to change the focus of the information load. This quite frequently happens with the idiom to have one’s cake and eat it which, in this corpus, is readily expressed as to eat one’s cake and have it: But it is impossible to eat your cake and have it; and if the Parnellite members really feel these matters so keenly, it is a thousand pities they did not think of that when they associated with, and got money from, the gang of unmitigated scoundrels with whom, as William Harcourt knows perfectly well, they have been working for years. (“Colonel Saunderson and the Parnellites,” 1887) Election pronouncements are generally flavoured by human desire to eat the cake as well as to have it; and an American presidential campaign rarely provides many exceptions to this rule. (“The Fourth Term,” 1944).

By inverting the customary order of the two clauses making up this idiom, the theme and rheme are also inverted. The effect is surprising and consequently the information is more striking. Thus, the syntactic variations of addition, substitution, deletion, and permutation each have a definite semantic function. Selected accordingly, the variation has, against the backdrop of the idiom’s conventional structure, the

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force of stressing the addresser’s particular position, idea, or opinion concerning the subject matter being debated.

4. Reflections In the light of this modest examination of the synchronic behaviour of a set of food and drink idioms in one particular medium, a historical corpus of journalistic prose, it would appear that Barkema’s postulation may indeed be once again confirmed. The four prototypical variations that the idioms in this corpus seem to undergo are yet again addition, deletion, substitution, and permutation, with the first three alterations being made prevalently upon preand postmodifiers at phrase level, while the latter tend to act at the level of the clause. Just as Barkema pointed out in his research, there appears to be no idiosyncrasy in the idioms’ syntactic behaviour: the syntactic modifications follow a systematic pattern in accordance with the scope of the information being highlighted, which may respectively be more specific, more generic, in contrast with, or inverted compared to the message carried by the conventional syntactic layout. Despite the apparent incongruence between syntax and semantics, there is in actual fact a strong correlation between the structural elements and the meaning elements of such expressions, a feature that has been recognized and normally been accepted for all other items making up a text (words, phrases, clauses, sentences) but not for idioms. But idioms compose texts too and as such do actually comply with the seven features that generate a text: cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality. As such the claim that idiom behaviour is erratic can quite clearly be confuted. The frequent and systematic rearrangements of syntactic structures in order to underline varying but constant semantic perspectives not only show that idioms respect the textual features of cohesion and coherence but also that they obey the principle of intentionality that regulates the purpose of a text—which, in the case of this corpus, as said earlier, is not just to inform but also to persuade and entertain. The syntactic contrast between the known and the new found in the idioms creates irony that is a striking, memorable, and undoubtedly effective communicative strategy employed by the addresser to influence the reader—albeit subtly. The Times, as is well known, is a broadsheet newspaper whose readership has always belonged to the upper middle classes, and whose reporters have traditionally been expected to convey news in a more or less objective way. The manipulation of conventional expressions thus represents a refined and delicate linguistic technique that conveys subjectivity without disappointing the readership and its expectancies from such a newspaper.

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Idiom flexibility also complies with the principles of informativity, situationality, and intertextuality. Statements related to the themes of war, famine, and power, which can risk ending up as being trivial or clearly opinionated, acquire in this corpus a balance through the use of idiomatic expressions whose new syntactic layouts heighten the reader’s curiosity without leaving him or her too perplexed by the obscurity of personal judgments or too bored by the obviousness of true facts. Consequently, certain idioms become more closely linked to certain themes and, as testified to in the first part of this article, tend to be more productive than others in determined situations leading to the recurrent use of one idiom in a series of related articles, a feature that consents both stylistic and informational continuity within the same medium. In sum, the results of this research have shown that the idioms’ syntactic behaviour, from a synchronic point of view, follows a recognizable pattern that has a definable semantic configuration and, from a diachronic point of view, is consistent in one medium whose objective is not solely to inform but also to persuade and entertain its readership.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Charlotte Brewer is a fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, and lecturer in English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Editing Piers Plowman (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and The Oxford English Dictionary: Treasure house of the language (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2007). Her research project Examining the OED, which was set up in 2005, is engaged in quantitative and qualitative studies of this dictionary; results are published at http://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/main/. Julie Coleman is a Reader in the Department of English at the University of Leicester. She organized the first ICHLL in Leicester, and co-edited a volume of papers with Anne McDermott: Historical dictionaries and historical dictionary research (Niemeyer, 2004). Two volumes of her A history of cant and slang dictionaries (Oxford University Press, 2004) cover the periods 1567–1784 and 1785–1858. She is currently working on two further volumes to bring the survey to the present day. John Considine teaches English at the University of Alberta. He has published articles on dictionaries of English, German, medieval Latin, and a number of other languages, and is editing the seventeenth-century volume in the Ashgate series Early English lexicographers. His book Dictionaries in early modern Europe: Lexicography and the making of heritage will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. Fredric Dolezal is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He has research interests that question the dictionary as text and the literariness of literary theory, especially as they appear under the rubrics history of linguistics and literary lexicography. He is an editor of Lexicographica: An international annual for lexicography. Peter Gilliver is an Associate Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. He has published a number of articles on the history of the OED, and is working on a history of the Dictionary for publication by Oxford University Press.

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R. Carter Hailey teaches medieval and early modern literature and textual studies at The College of William and Mary. He has published essays on a variety of lexicographic and bibliographical topics and is currently working on a book On paper: The bibliographical description and analysis of antique laid paper. Giovanni Iamartino is Professor of English at the University of Milan. His research interests range from English historical linguistics to the history of Anglo-Italian linguistic and cultural relations. Recent publications include articles on the Italian loanwords in English and on the reception of Byron’s works in Italy. A collection of essays entitled Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary and the eighteenth-century world of words, co-edited with Robert DeMaria Jr., is due out in Autumn 2006. He is currently working on a history of punctuation in English. Elisabetta Lonati is a lecturer at the University of Milan, where she teaches English. Her research interests range from Middle English to historical lexicology and lexicography. She has published a critical edition of a late Middle English Pater Noster tract as well as articles on eighteenth-century linguistic debate in English encyclopaedias. She is currently writing a volume on English encyclopaedism from a lexicographic perspective. Rod McConchie is a Docent and University Lecturer in English at the University of Helsinki. He has published a book on sixteenth century medical terminology entitled Lexicography and physicke: the record of sixteenth-century English medical terminology (Clarendon Press, 1997), and articles on a range of subjects including Italian fencing borrowings into English in the early modern period, sixteenth-century lexicography, and the prefix dis- in Middle English. A series of articles on early dis- words is currently being produced, and he is working on volume 2 of the Ashgate series on early English lexicography. Noel Osselton has held chairs of English Language in Holland and in England. He has over fifty years of practical experience in editing dictionaries, and has written extensively on the early history of English lexicography. Laura Pinnavaia is a lecturer at the University of Milan, where she teaches English and English linguistics. Research interests are in the fields of lexicography and lexicology. She is author of Italian borrowings in the Oxford English Dictionary: A lexicographic, linguistic and cultural analysis (Bulzoni, 2001) and is currently working on a project which focuses on idiomatic expressions.

218

Notes on Contributors

Gabriele Stein has been Professor of English at the University of Heidelberg since 1990 and was the Founding President of EURALEX. Her main research areas are lexicology, lexicography, and grammar. Her publications include two monographs on early English lexicography, The English dictionary before Cawdrey (1985) and John Palsgrave as Renaissance linguist (1997); a critical assessment of EFL dictionaries, Better words (2002); and a new systematic approach to vocabulary teaching and learning, Developing your English vocabulary (2002). Her new book on English affixation will appear in 2007. Paola Tornaghi is Associate Professor of English language and linguistics at the Faculty of Economics of the State University of Milano-Bicocca. Her publications include the volume The history of English and the dynamics of power (edited with M.L. Maggioni) and various articles. Her research interests focus on the phonetics and phonology of Germanic languages, in particular of Old and Middle English and early Modern English; English vocabulary in both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective; and word-order in Old English prose. She has also studied some of the main aspects of Old English glosses to Latin texts, and Anglo-Saxon lexicography—in particular, the “Anglo–Saxonici– Latini” dictionaries compiled in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

INDEX Aarsleff, Hans vii Addison, Joseph 124 table 9–4 Ælfric 75, 78 African Englishes 12 alphabet fatigue xii, xiv, 81–90, 161 alphabetization 11, 30, 34, 52–53, 81 Alston, R. C. vii, 44, 46 American English 12, 142n3, 152. See also Dictionary of American English. annotations and ownership marks xvi, 44–46 antonyms, treatment of 35, 37 Apperson, George 136 Arabic, Spanish borrowings from 32 Archer, Sir Symon 50 Australian English 12 Bailey, Nathan: alphabet fatigue in 82 as source for Oxford English Dictionary 124 retrenchments in Joseph Nichol Scott’s revision of his work 85 shifts in compiling technique 88– 90 use of cuts in dictionary of 1727 xii Bailey, Richard W. 84 Bale, John 39–43, 47–48 Barbauld, Anna Letitia xiii, 125 Barber, Charles 17 Barbour, John 17 Baret, John 31–33, 35, 43 Barkema, Henk 178, 187, 190 Barker-Benfield, Bruce 54n2 Barlow, Frederick 85 Barrow, John 92 Bean, Donald xiv Bede, the Venerable 52 Béjoint, Henri 9n Benedictine Rule 72, 76

Benson, Larry 18 Bible: cited in OED 18 concordances to 111, 123n10 idioms deriving from 183 in Farmer and Henley xiv, 149– 150, 162 Old English versions of 52, 71, 76–77 Binns, James 47 biography, as part of the history of lexicography xvii Birmingham collection of English texts database 178 Blake, William xiii, 9, 123–124, 125n11 Blancardus, Stephanus xii–xiii, 91– 108 passim Blount, Thomas 3, 82, 84–85, 104 borrowings, marking of 32, 36 Bosworth and Toller, Anglo-Saxon Dictionary 67, 78–79 Bradley, Henry 166, 170, 171 Bradshaw, Lael 92 Brewer, Charlotte xiii, xvi, 16 as author, 109–135 Brewer, Derek 15 Brewer, E. C. 148, 149 fig. 9–5 British English 12 Broome, William 122 Browning, Robert 131n19 Bullokar, John 2–3, 11, 26, 36–38, 82– 84, 87–88 Burchfield, Robert 116n6, 119, 128n13, 175 Burke, Edmund 114, 124 table 9–4 Burney, Frances 124 table 9–4 Burns, Robert 124 table 9–4 Burton, William 50 Byron, George Gordon Noel, Lord 131n19

220 Calepino, Ambrogio 26 Calvert, Dan 115n4 Cannan, Charles 167 Cannon, Christopher 15–24 passim Caribbean Englishes 12 Castellus, Bartholomaeus 93 Catholicon anglicum 26, 30, 33, 35, 43 Cawdrey, Robert 2–3, 11, 26, 37, 81– 83, 85–87 Celsus, Aulus Cornelius 97 censorship of dictionaries 137 Century dictionary 169 Chambers dictionary 81–82 Chambers, Ephraim 92 Changing Times database 179 Chapman, Robert 167–172 Chaucer, Geoffrey ix–x, 14–24, 31, 111, 119–120 Chomsky, Noam 10 citation of sources xiv, 31, 52, 93, 95– 96, 99, 101–103, 147–151, 161 Clarke, Samuel 3 Cocker, Edward 82 Cockeram, Henry 2–3, 26, 36–38, 82, 84, 87 Coleman, Julie xiii, xv, xvi as author, 136–165 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 125 Coles, Elisha 3, 82, 87 Collins paperback dictionary 82 compound words, treatment of 90, 138 comprehensiveness, as ideal x, 29 Concise Oxford dictionary 81 concordances, as sources 111, 113, 120, 149 Connelly, Thomas viii, x Considine, John 4n4, 54n2, 109n2 as author, vii–xvii Cooper, Thomas 31 Coote, Edmund 3, 86 Cowper, William (poet) 124 table 9–4 Cowper, William (surgeon) 103 Corneille, Thomas xiii Cowell, John xvi Craigie, Sir William xiv, 110, 166–177 Cram, David 4n3

Index Crocker, Temple 92 cross-references 154–156, 161 cultural repository, dictionary as 6 currency of words, treatment of x, 31, 36 Cursor mundi 18–20, 22–23 Day, John x, 41, 47–48 Defoe, Benjamin 82 Defoe, Daniel 124 table 9–4 de Laet, Jan xi D’Ewes, Sir Simonds xi, 51, 53–60, 67 analysis of entries in his manuscript dictionary 70–80 dialect words, treatment of 31–32 Dickens, Charles 147 table 9–5, 150 fig. 9–6 dictionary, in titles of books 26, 29 Dictionary of American English xiv, 172 Dictionary of the older Scottish tongue xv, 84, 171 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française 6 dictionary projects, multi-authored vii–viii, xv, 84 Diderot and D’Alembert, Encyclopédie xiii Dodsworth, Roger 50, 54, 56 Dolezal, Fredric ix, xvi as author, 1–13 Dugdale, Sir William xi, 50–60 analysis of entries in his manuscript dictionary 61–80 Dunbar, William 119 Dutch, in early polyglot dictionaries 26 Dyche and Pardon, New general English dictionary 92 E., B. 147 table 9–5, 149 fig. 9–5, 162 Early English Text Society 44, 111 early modern lexicography x, xii, 2–4, 25–90 passim editions of historic dictionaries, modern vii, xvi, 5, 44 Eighteenth-century collections online database xiii, 120–122, 133

Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective eighteenth-century lexicography xii– xiii, 81–108 passim Eldredge, Niles 21 Ellis, A. J. xiv Elyot, Sir Thomas 17, 29, 31–32 Encyclopaedia Britannica 92 encyclopedic information, treatment of 87–88, 159–161 encyclopedic texts xii–xiii, 91–92 Englishes 11–13 English short title catalogue 114 etymology 3, 32, 159, 161 Examining the OED research project 115 Fachsprachen 25 facsimiles, as resource for study of dictionaries vii, 44 Farmer and Henley, Slang and its analogues xiii-xiv, 136–165 passim. Fenton, Elijah 122 Fernando, Chitra 188 Florio, John 30, 32–34 Freed, Lewis M. 6 French: bilingual dictionaries of 25–26, 29–32 English borrowings from 15–16, 32, 36 equivalents in English dictionaries 89, 156–158 Fuller, Elizabeth E. 46n8–9 Gallica online project vii Garland, John of 33 Gazophylacium anglicanum 82 Gellerstam, Martin 84 German: in early polyglot dictionaries 26 equivalents in English dictionaries 157–158 Gilchrist, Alexander 124 Gilliver, Peter xiv, xv, xvii as author, 166–177 glossaries, as sources x, 3–4, 25, 29, 111, 120, 148 Glossographia anglicana nova xii, 82 Goodrich, Thomas x, 43

221

Gould, Stephen Jay 21 Gower, John 16, 19 grammatical function, information about 27–28, 30–31, 152–153, 161 Greek, English borrowings from 32, 36, 106 Green, Jonathon ix, 2 Gregory the Great, St, Old English versions of 52, 71, 73, 76 Grimm and Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch xv, xvi, 84 Grose, Francis 147 table 9–5, 149 fig. 9–5, 162 Hailey, R. Carter ix–x as author, 14–24 Hall, Fitzedward 169 Halliday, M. A. K. 188 Halliwell, J. O. 138 hard words 2, 4, 36–37, 83–84 Harris, John xii–xiii, 91-108 passim Hatton, Sir Christopher 50–52 Haugen, Einar xii Hausmann, Franz Josef vii Hawes, Stephen 119 Hebrew, English borrowings from 32, 36 Henley, W. E. See Farmer and Henley Hetherington, Sue 52, 59 Higgins, John 39, 44 Higgins, Thomas viii, x Hippocrates 102 historiography of lexicography 5–10 Hoccleve, Thomas 16, 123n10 Hollyband, Claudius 32 homilies, Old English 52, 77 Hooke, Robert 126 Hotten, John Camden 148, 149 fig. 9– 5 Howard, Thomas, Earl of Arundel 50 Howells, William Dean 169 Howlet, Richard: biographical details x, 41–43, 49 contents and readership of Abcedarium 43–44 dialect words in Abcedarium 31 Howlet or Huloet x, 39–40

222 Illinois copy of Abcedarium 44–46 printing of Abcedarium x–xi, 46– 48 treatment of phrases 31 treatment of transferred senses 34 Hüllen, Werner 33 Hunt, Leigh 125 idioms xv–xvi, 34–35, 178–191 illustrations xii inclusion criteria xiv, 30, 166–177 Indian English 12 influence, concept of 5, 7 Italian: bilingual dictionaries of 26, 30, 32–34 English borrowings from 15–16, 32 equivalents in English dictionaries 156–158 Johnson Dictionary Project xvi Johnson, Samuel: and academy dictionaries 6 and alphabet fatigue 82 as source for Oxford English Dictionary 111, 124 table 9– 4 encyclopedic entries 87 J. S. Farmer compares himself to 136–137 on “the track of the alphabet” 81 publisher’s pressure on 85 read for pleasure 4n4 reputation of 5–7 treatment of compound words 90 Johnson, William 93 Jonson, Benjamin 147 table 9–5, 150 fig. 9–6 Joscelyn, John xi, 53 journalism, language of 179–191 Junius, Hadrianus 26 K., J. (i.e. John Kersey?) 82–83, 88 Kachru, Braj 12 Keats, John 123n10 Keill, James 103 Ker, N. P. 45 Kersey, John xii, 3, 82–83, 86–87

Index Lambarde, William 44–46, 52, 63, 67, 76, 79 Lancashire, Ian vii, xvi Landau, Sidney 2, 3n2 Latin: anglicized and latinate forms 103– 106 definitions and glosses in dictionaries of English and Old English 53, 89 dictionaries and glossaries of 25, 29, 35, 43–48 dictionaries of, possible influence on English lexicography 3, 27, 33, 83–85 English borrowings from 15–17, 36 latinized personal names x, 39–40, 92n1 Law, Vivien vii law codes, Old English 55, 61, 63, 65– 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 80 Lemery, Nicolas 103 Levins, Peter 31, 35–36, 39 lexical invention. See new words. lexical item, definition of 27–28 lexicography, definitions of viii, 4n3, 7 lexicology: definitions of viii, 27 dictionaries and vii, x, 25–38 lexicon. See vocabulary Lexicon balatronicum 147 table 9–5, 149 fig. 9–5 Lexicons of early modern English database xvi–xvii Liber scintillarum 58, 73, 79 Lilly, William 43 linguistics, history of, as academic subdiscipline vii Lippard, George 131n19 Lisle, William 52 Literature Online database xiii, 120– 122, 133 Little, William 171 Littleton, Edward 43n4 Lloyd, William 3 Lonati, Elisabetta xii–xiii

Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective as author, 91–108 Longman dictionary of contemporary English 82 Longman grammar of spoken and written English 178 Lonsdale, Roger 129 Lowell, James Russell 169 Lydgate, John 15–17, 31, 119 Machyn, Henry 41, 49 Mainwaring, Sir Henry 4n4 Malpighi, Marcello 103 manuscripts, in the study of lexicography xi, xv–xvi, 51–80 passim Marckwardt, Albert xi, 59 marketplace, dictionaries and the 4, 6, 10, 13 Martin, Benjamin 82–83, 87 Matsell, George W. 147 table 9–5, 149 fig. 9–5 Mayhew, Henry 147 table 9–5 McConchie, Rod x–xi, xvi, xvii, 107– 108 as author, 39–49 McDermott, Anne 87 McLoughlin, Sarah 115n4 medical texts 91–108 passim medieval lexicography x, xvi, 25–26 Medulla grammatice 26, 29–31 Michael (“Dan Michael”), Ayenbite of inwit 16–24 Middle English, dictionaries of, before 1928 111 Middle English dictionary ix, 14–24 passim, 84 Mierdman, Stephen 41, 48 Milton, John 111, 119–120, 125 Minsheu, John 26, 32 Moon, Rosamund 180 morphology, treatment of 34–36 Mugglestone, Lynda xvi, 109n1 Mulcaster, Richard 86 Murray, Sir James A. H.: acknowledgement of U. S. volunteer readers 114 archive of Murray Papers xvi

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comments on entries in Farmer and Henley 137 friendship with Skeat 120 on quotations for eccentric vocabulary 123n10 on the role of quotations 110–114, 120 on the treatment of affixes xiv, 166 Murray, K. M. E. xvii, 109n1 Murray, Wilfrid 166 Nashe, Thomas 123n10 New canting dictionary 147 table 9–5, 149 fig. 9–5 New Oxford dictionary of English 82 New Penguin English dictionary 82 new words ix, 14–21, 27, 30, 36 Nominale sive verbale in gallicis 25 Nowell, Laurence xi, 44–46, 59; as “Laur.,” 71, 75–6 Noyes, Gertrude. See Starnes and Noyes obsolete words. See currency of words Old English, dictionaries of xi, 50–80 passim, 111 Old French, discussed by Palsgrave 31 Onions, C. T. 110–111, 113, 166, 170– 171 online and machine-readable dictionaries vii, xvi, 17, 90, 109, 113– 117 Ordbog over det danske sprog 84 Ortus vocabulorum 26, 30, 35 Osselton, Noel xii, xv, 161 as author, 81–90 Owen, William 92 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography xi, xiii Oxford English Dictionary: affixes, treatment of xiv, 166–177 changing principles from early to late volumes 84 early modern vocabulary in 2 eighteenth-century vocabulary in xiii, 109–135 passim female authors in 125 first citations in x, 16–17

224 idioms in xv length of, always a problem 112, 166–177 medical terms in 104 online availability xvi, 109, 114– 117 ordering of entries 21 quotations in 109–135 passim, 148 read for pleasure 4n4 revision of, current vii, xiii, xv, 122n9, 126–135 source for Farmer and Henley 148 Supplement (1972–1986) 119, 128n13, 175 Palsgrave, John x, 29–32, 35–36 Paracelsus 102 Partridge, Eric 137 Peckham, Sir George 44 Pecock, Reginald 19 Pelegromius, Simon 33 Perceval, Richard 32 period dictionaries 171 Phillips, Edward xii, 3, 82, 84, 86–87 Philological Society 110 phrases, treatment of 31, 138, 141– 142; see also idioms Pinnavaia, Laura xv, xvi as author, 178–191 plagiarism ix, 5, 85 Pliny the elder 79 polyglot dictionaries, early modern 26 polysemous words, treatment of x, 34, 110–111, 138 Pope, Alexander xiii, 121–122, 124 table 9–4 Promptorium parvulorum 26, 29–31, 33, 43 pronunciation, treatment of 11, 160– 161 punctuated equilibrium 21 Purcell, John 103 Quellenforschung, as method of studying early dictionaries ix Read, Allen Walker xii, 3 reading of dictionaries, consecutive 4, 7

Index register, treatment of x, 32, 142–147, 161 Reichmann, Oskar vii Revens, Lee 136 rhyming dictionaries 31, 35 Richardson, Charles 110 Richardson, Samuel 124 table 9–4 Riddel, William x, 41, 48 Rider, John 31, 34 Robinson, F. N. 15 Rolle Psalter 19 Roman de la rose 31 Rosenbach company and museum 44– 46 Rosier, James 45–46 Royal Society 91 Rushworth, John 54, 56 Ruskin, John 169, 170 Schäfer, Jürgen xvi, 2–4, 16, 114, 115n4 Schreyer, Rüdiger 6 Scott, Joseph Nichol 85 Scott, Sir Walter 147 table 9–5, 150 fig. 9–6 Selden, John 68, 79 Senertus (i.e. Daniel Sennett) 102 Shakespeare, William: concordances to, as source for OED 111, 123n10 contribution to English vocabulary 21 first citations in OED from x, 17 quoted in Farmer and Henley 147 table 9–5, 149, 150 fig. 9–6, 162 Shorter Oxford English dictionary 171 Silva, Penny 110–111, 125–126 Simpson, John 109n2, 113, 126–127 Singaporean English 12 Skeat, W. W. 120 social history of learned texts xi, xiii, 4–13 passim Somner, William xi, 51–60 passim analysis of entries in his dictionary 71–80 Spanish: bilingual dictionaries of 26, 32

Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective English borrowings from 32 equivalents in English dictionaries 89, 157–158 Spectator, The 135 Spelman, Sir Henry 50, 51, 55; 62, 66, 71–72, 77 Stanley, Eric 45n7, 139n2 Starnes and Noyes, English dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson ix, xii, xv, 1–7 Stein, Gabriele ix, x, 1–2, 5, 39, 41 as author 25–38 Stocqueler, J. D. 12 subject fields, marking of 32, 36 Swift, Jonathan 124 table 9–4, 147 table 9–5 Swinburne, A. C. 123–124 synonyms, treatment of x, 25, 32–33, 37, 88, 154, 156–158, 161 syntactic behaviour of idioms 178–191 passim Tennyson, Alfred 111, 119–120 Thackeray, W. M. 147 table 9–5, 150 fig. 9–6 Thomas, Thomas 31 Times, The xv, 179–191 titles of early dictionaries 26, 29 topical ordering 1–2, 4n3, 25 Tornaghi, Paola xi, xvi, xvii as author, 50–80 Tractatus sinonimorum 25 Trésor de la langue française xii Trevisa, John 19 Twysden, Sir Roger xvi typography in dictionaries 11, 176– 177 typology of dictionaries ix, 1, 7–9

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Tyson, Edward 103 unfinished dictionaries xii usage marking xiv, 87, 142–147 users of dictionaries 4, 7, 10–11 variant forms, treatment of 53 Verstegan, Richard 64 Vocabolario degli accademici della Crusca 6 vocabulary, actual and potential x, 27 distinguished from lexicon 26–27, 29 Wanley, Humfrey 51, 53 Watson, James xvii Webster’s Dictionary 167–170, 172 Welsh, bilingual dictionaries of 26 Whalen, Christopher 115n4 Wheelocke, Abraham 52 Whibley, Charles 137 White, Gilbert 126 White, Henry 170 Whitney, William Dwight 119 Wiegand, Herbert Ernst vii Wilkins, John 4n3 Willinsky, John xvi Willis, Thomas 103 Wimsatt, W. K. 6 Winchester, Simon xvii Withals, John 31, 43–44 Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal xv word-formation. See morphology and new words Worrall, Walter 171–172, 177 York Civic Records 126 Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson 187 Zgusta, Ladislav vii, 7n, 8