The Age of the Dictionary - The History of English
An amusing video by The Open University on the history of dictionaries and the journey of standarlization of English spelling:
The British Library and Dictionaries
The British Library, an organisationestablished by the British Parliament in 1972 - and which incorporated the British Library Museum - has an interesting section on the history of British dictionaries (http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/dic/meanings.html).
There you can learn that the first initialattempt at production of an English dictionary came in 1582, with Mulcaster's Elementarie, an 8,000 word list (with no definitions, albeit), in an attempt to start organising the English language and show that no 'language, be it whatsoever, is better able toutter all arguments, either with more pith, or greater planesse, than ourEnglish tung is, if the English utterer be as skillfull in the matter, which heis to utter.’
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| William Caxton, first English printer |
The Elementarie was produced only about one hundred years after William Caxton took the first printing device to England (in the late 15th Century) and the spelling of the English language, which has never been controlled by the government, was still not greatly consolidated.
You may also learn about later developments, like Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall (of 1604, described further herein), the 1879 to 1928 Oxford English Dictionary and reaching the 2002 Online Oxford English Dictionary, among many others. On the British Library site, readers may view the title page and specific pages within these books.
Four and a Half Centuries of Lexicographical Belligerence
One of the main difficulties in studying the history of English dictionaries is establishing the origins of the first English dictionaries. There are many controversies among the first dictionary makers, including abundant accusations of plagiarism. It was common for dictionaries to "borrow" material from one another from the very beginning.
Jack Lynch, an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers, discusses the matter on the article "Disgraced by Miscarriage: Four and a Half Centuries of Lexicographical Belligerence”. Lynch analyses the origins of lexicography going through the quarrels among lexicographers (which, surprisingly, can be quite vicious!).
As Lynch explains:
The lexicographical rivalries obviously did not stop there. For instance, in 1656, Thomas Blount published the largest English dictionary up to then, Glossographia. Two years later, Edward Phillips, nephew of the poet John Milton, published A New World of English Words, “borrowing” many entries from Blount’s Glossographia. Some rivalries over accusations of plagiarism became famous in the world of Lexicography, like the one between Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester, known as “the dictionary wars”.
Some dictionaries tried to play their rivals by creating fake entries that would indicate plagiarism. One amusing example is given by Lynch in his article: the New Columbia Encyclopedia, in 1975, included a long entry on Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, an American fountain designer who had become famous with Flags Up!, a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes. According to the text, Ms. Mountweazel met a premature end, dying in an explosion while she was researching an article for Combustibles magazine.
Virginia Mountweazel was only an inside joke among the encyclopedia’s authors, but not long after she is said to have appeared in other encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries. Based on that story, mountweazel became a neologism, used as a synonym for ‘phantom’, ‘mischievous entry’ or ‘false entry’. The magazine New Yorker recovered the story in this article, showing that even nowadays dictionaries still play with mountweazels to be able to catch plagiarism - the article tells the saga of finding out a made-up word in the 2001 edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary. It seems that the "dictionary wars" is far from ending.
Jack Lynch, an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers, discusses the matter on the article "Disgraced by Miscarriage: Four and a Half Centuries of Lexicographical Belligerence”. Lynch analyses the origins of lexicography going through the quarrels among lexicographers (which, surprisingly, can be quite vicious!).
As Lynch explains:
Even this [Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall] — the first real English dictionary— has been accused of plagiarism, odd as it may sound to chastise the first of its kind for being derivative. Around half the headwords in Cawdrey’s book were stolen from a table of difficult words in The English Schole-Maister, published by Edmund Coote eight years earlier. Perhaps it’s only just that the thief should be thieved in turn, so Cawdrey got his comeuppance when another lexicographer, John Bullokar, stole many of Cawdrey’s entries for his English Expositor. Cawdrey’s son then revised his father’s dictionary, and stole entries back from Bullokar. It begins to assume the appearance of a vaudeville routine, as two thieves repeatedly pick each other’s pockets for the same wallet.
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| Published in The New Yorker 10/18/2004 by David Sipress |
The lexicographical rivalries obviously did not stop there. For instance, in 1656, Thomas Blount published the largest English dictionary up to then, Glossographia. Two years later, Edward Phillips, nephew of the poet John Milton, published A New World of English Words, “borrowing” many entries from Blount’s Glossographia. Some rivalries over accusations of plagiarism became famous in the world of Lexicography, like the one between Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester, known as “the dictionary wars”.
Some dictionaries tried to play their rivals by creating fake entries that would indicate plagiarism. One amusing example is given by Lynch in his article: the New Columbia Encyclopedia, in 1975, included a long entry on Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, an American fountain designer who had become famous with Flags Up!, a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes. According to the text, Ms. Mountweazel met a premature end, dying in an explosion while she was researching an article for Combustibles magazine.
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| The cover of an imaginary book made by a group of designers (click here to learn more) |
Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall
Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, was the first single-language English dictionary ever published. With 130 pages, it presents a selection of 2,543 words and their first-ever definitions. Cawdrey subtitled his dictionary “for the benefit of Ladies, Gentlewomen, and other unskilled folk”: his aim was to create an in-depth guide for the lesser educated who might not know the “hard usual English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French.”
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| The title page to the "Table Alphabeticall" (click to enlarge). Its full title was: "A table alphabeticall conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard vsuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French, &c. With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of ladies, gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons. Whereby they may the more easilie and better vnderstand many hard English wordes, vvhich they shall heare or read in scriptures, sermons, or elswhere, and also be made able to vse the same aptly themselues." |
The definitions provided by Cawdrey are very concise and he focuses on the “hard words” that English borrowed from other languages. “While small and unsophisticated by today's standards, the Table was the largest dictionary of its type at the time and, when viewed in the full context of Early Modern English lexicography, it exemplifies the movement from words lists and glosses to dictionaries which more closely resemble those of today”, writes R. G. Siemens, from the University of British Columbia.
The entries in Cawdrey’s book came from a number of diverse sources, like Latin-English dictionaries, popular didactic texts of the time and glosses of religious, legal, scientific, and literary texts.
Samuel Johnson's dictionary is better known when it comes to the beginning of English lexicography, but Cawdrey's work also gets its deserved recognition from the Academic community. For instance, the Table was published in a new edition by the Bodleian Library, from the University of Oxford, in 2007 (click here to learn more about this new edition). And Raymond G. Siemens, from the Department of English at University of British Columbia, edited an online version of Cawdrey's Table, with a transcription of the 1604 edition. It is possible to find it at the University of Toronto Library’s site: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/ret/cawdrey/cawdrey0.html
Some examples of entries taken from the site:
societie, fellowship, company
sodomitrie, when one man lyeth filthylie with another man
[fr] soiourne, remaine in a place
solace, comfort
solemnize, to doe a thing with great pompe, reuerence, or deuotion
Some examples of entries taken from the site:
societie, fellowship, company
sodomitrie, when one man lyeth filthylie with another man
[fr] soiourne, remaine in a place
solace, comfort
solemnize, to doe a thing with great pompe, reuerence, or deuotion
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language
On researching the history of dictionaries, you will probably come across references of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language. First published in 1755, Johnson's work is one of the most famous and important English dictionaries in history. The dictionary took nine years to be compiled and lists 40,000 words, each defined in detail and illustrated with quotations covering every branch of learning.
It was an impressive achievement for the time: in comparison, the French Dictionnarre had taken 55 years to compile and required the dedication of 40 scholars (Johnson only had six helpers). The prestige of Johnson's dictionary survived throughout times: in 2005, a commemorative issue of the 50 pence coin was launched to celebrate its 250th anniversary. The occasion was also remembered by newspaper The Guardian, that published an article on Johnson's biography.
It was an impressive achievement for the time: in comparison, the French Dictionnarre had taken 55 years to compile and required the dedication of 40 scholars (Johnson only had six helpers). The prestige of Johnson's dictionary survived throughout times: in 2005, a commemorative issue of the 50 pence coin was launched to celebrate its 250th anniversary. The occasion was also remembered by newspaper The Guardian, that published an article on Johnson's biography.
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| The commemorative coin from 2005 shows entries from Johnson's dictionary for the words "Fifty" and "Pence". |
Johnson’s work is considered the "first great English dictionary” and it is commonly pointed out as the first English dictionary in history. Jack Lynch, an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers and the editor of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work That Defined the English Language (New York: Walker & Company, 2004) and A Guide to Samuel Johnson, discusses the matter on the article "Disgraced by Miscarriage: Four and a Half Centuries of Lexicographical Belligerence".
In the article, he points out that 663 dictionaries had already been published in England before Johnson published his work. “The first English book with dictionary in its title was The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght, which appeared in 1538; it’s actually an English-Latin dictionary”, he writes, adding that “even if we limit our focus to what linguists call the general monolingual English dictionaries—the ones concerned with defining English words not confined to a single field—Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language is not the 664th English dictionary, but still the 21st".
In reality, the first general monolingual English dictionary is Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, almost 150 years before Samuel Johnson made his debut. But why has Johnson’s work been favored in relation to others?
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| The first page of Johnson's dictionary (click to enlarge) |
But perhaps the main reason for Johnson's everlasting fame is the fact that, while everybody was busy trying to enlist exclusively the "hard words", Johnson opened his pages to words people actually used. And that created a new trend in lexicography and defined the future of dictionaries.
“Johnson’s real labor in the Dictionary was not including words like obumbrate but words like cat and hat and mat.”, writes Lynch. John Kersey's A New English Dictionary, from 1702, and Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary, from 1721, were the first dictionaries to include common words (and were also the first ones to be written by professional lexicographers). But Johnson was the first author to do so in a systematic way, applying the same careful standards of definition to these words as to the so-called 'hard words'.
“After Johnson, English lexicography became increasingly concerned with the entire language in all its complexity. Johnson’s prodigious labor meant his was to become the first standard dictionary — the first to be authoritative, the first to settle arguments. No earlier English lexicographer achieved a comparable position in British culture. “, writes Lynch.
Johnson's status remains untouched to this date. It is possible to read poems about his work on this page, which is part of Johnson's Dictionary Online and whose author is working on a digital edition of Johnson's book. In The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page you can find a collection of his quotations - the page brings the information that Johnson is the second most quoted person in the English language, after Shakespeare.
The Dictionary of English Language might not have been the first English dictionary ever, but Samuel Johnson became the pop-star of lexicography for bringing the dictionaries closer to the reality of language use. And that is why he gets the highest “top of mind” when it comes to the history of dictionaries.
The first American dictionary
If you Google "first American dictionary", you will get various indications that Noah Webster’s dictionary holds the title. But in reality the one responsible for it was Samuel Johnson Jr. (no relation to the British Samuel Johnson that, ironically, is often erroneously pointed out as the author of the first English dictionary).
Samuel Johnson, Jr.'s, School Dictionary; Being a Compendium of the Latest and Most Improved Dictionaries was published in 1798, beating Webster by eight years.
The newspaper New York Times published a centennial commemorative text in 1898 entitled JOHNSON'S DICTIONARY.; Samuel's, Also, but an American Work and the First. It starts saying that:
The misconception is so common that it intrigued Ammon Shea, author of the book “Reading the Oxford English Dictionary from A to Zyxt”, who wrote a post in the Oxford University Press’s blog discussing the reasons for the general perception that Noah Webster wrote the first American dictionary. Shea writes:
Researching texts on English dictionaries shows how Lexicography history is often based on things people "just know".
Samuel Johnson, Jr.'s, School Dictionary; Being a Compendium of the Latest and Most Improved Dictionaries was published in 1798, beating Webster by eight years.
The newspaper New York Times published a centennial commemorative text in 1898 entitled JOHNSON'S DICTIONARY.; Samuel's, Also, but an American Work and the First. It starts saying that:
The first dictionary by an American author published in this country was Samuel Johnson, Jr.'s, "School Dictionary; Being a Compendium of the Latest and Most Improved Dictionaries," printed in New Haven in 1798 by Edward O'Brien. The British Museum has a copy presumably perfect; Yale College Library has the Brinley copy, which lacks pages 157-168 out of 198, the total number. No other copies seem to be known.(the complete text is available on pdf)
The misconception is so common that it intrigued Ammon Shea, author of the book “Reading the Oxford English Dictionary from A to Zyxt”, who wrote a post in the Oxford University Press’s blog discussing the reasons for the general perception that Noah Webster wrote the first American dictionary. Shea writes:
Many of the authors who make the claim that Noah Webster wrote the first American dictionary were likely aware of the fact that there may have been earlier ones, but for some reason choose to believe that Webster’s was the first one that was a ‘real’ American work, either because it appeared to have more patriotic orthography, or a greater deal of piety. Some others appear to have just relied on some sort of common knowledge which informed them that Webster must have been the first American lexicographer – why else would we hear so much about him?
I used to allow myself a great deal of umbrage when I found errors like this. Why I felt the need to do so is not quite clear to me – after all, I hadn’t made any great discovery myself; I’ve just managed to read one author who has a better grip on the facts than some others. Now I always find it interesting to discover commonly held beliefs that are just wrong – and it helps remind me that I have my own cherished and muddle-headed collection of things that I ‘just know’. And the more that time passes, the more I am convinced that ‘things that I just know’ is nothing more than a euphemism for ‘mistakes’.
Researching texts on English dictionaries shows how Lexicography history is often based on things people "just know".
The father of American English
Noah Webster (1758-1843) is said to have coined the term “American English”. Born into an average colonial American farming Family, he was described as an “arrogant, condescending, humorless and socially tone-deaf” man who “alienated and insulted his friends, political allies and potential professional contacts” according to this article in the New York Times.
Despite these characteristics, Webster was a patriot who thought that Americans should learn from American books. In his quest for this national identity, Webster wrote “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language”, in 1783, according to The Webster House and West Hartford Historical Society. The work was a compendium in three parts which included “The American Spelling Book”, a grammar book and a reader. It was one of the best sellers of its time, nicknamed the "Blue Backed Speller", and is estimated to have sold some 100 million copies.
It was used to teach American children how to spell for over 100 years. More may be read about the speller in this 1984 article by Sandra Tomkins for the McGill University Journal.
This work on American English was not enough for Webster, so in 1801 he decided to start working on his American English dictionaries. His first, the Compendious Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1806 and included around 37,000 entries. He then went on to work on the “American Dictionary of the English Language”, publish in 1828 (22 years later), containing over 65,000 entries. This work would later become the defining dictionary of the American language and would grant him praise by Sir James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, who called him a “born definer of words.”
The Oxford English Dictionary
The year was 1857 and the Philological Society of London was dissatisfied with the current English dictionaries. An "Unregistered Words Committee" was formed to search for unlisted and undefined words, those lacking in current dictionaries. The project was conceived by Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall. Trench was Dean of Westminster and published paper "On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries" (whose second version is available on Google Books), which he read before the Philological Society.
In the study, Trench identified seven distinct shortcomings in contemporary dictionaries:
- Incomplete coverage of obsolete words
- Inconsistent coverage of families of related words
- Incorrect dates for earliest use of words
- History of obsolete senses of words often omitted
- Inadequate distinction among synonyms
- Insufficient use of good illustrative quotations
- Space wasted on inappropriate or redundant content.
The Philological Society tried to cover these points, but ultimately concluded that the number of unlisted words would be far greater that the number of words in the English dictionaries of that time. So the focus was shifted to a more panoptic project: the making of of a true comprehensive dictionary. Books were allotted to volunteer readers, who would copy to quotation slips passages exhibiting actual word usage. Before the end of 1857, philologist Herbert Coleridge reported that 77 individuals had come forward to collect evidence for the Unregistered Words Committee. The project started on January 7, 1858 and was named “A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles”.
Richard Chenevix Trench organized the early stages of the project but was not able to continue it. Herbert Coleridge became the first editor. On 12th May, 1860, Coleridge’s dictionary plan was published and his team started the research. He made his house his first office. In May 1861, Herbert Coleridge died of tuberculosis.
After that, Frederick Furnivall became the editor, but he was not able to keep his workers spurred. He understood the need for a proficient excerpting system, and finally started several precursory projects. One of them was the Early English Text Society, founded in 1864 to publish unprinted early English literature to help with the quotation selection – it reprinted works that in the time were already printed elsewhere but were unobtainable except in limited and expensive editions.
Furnivall managed to recruit over 800 volunteers to read texts and record quotations. In the end, he handed over nearly two tons of quotation slips and other materials to his successor, James Murray, who became the editor in 1870.
James Murray is the most celebrated editor of the OED and is considered the one who made the greatest contributions. He devoted 36 years of his life to the dictionary and, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he was personally responsible for "more than half of the English vocabulary, comprising all the words beginning with the letters A-D, H-K, O-P, and all but a fraction of those beginning with T". He also provided a model methodology and set the standards that would make the OED the world-renowned resource it became.
When Murray became the editor, there was no defined publisher for the gigantic dictionary. Only in 1878 did Furnivall and Murray find a publisher that agreed with the project: Oxford University Press. It took 20 years for the colossus project to have a publisher. And it would only be completed 50 years later.
The first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was published in February of 1884 and covered from “A” to “Ant”. In the first seven years of work, the editors didn't get past the letter "b". The dictionary’s ambitious intention was to record every word used in English since 1150 and trace it back through all its shifting meanings, spellings and uses to its earliest recorded appearance, plus at least one citation for each century of its existence. In the end, it became twenty ponderous volumes long, with 615,000 entries; 2,412,000 supporting quotations, and 60,000,000 words.
The Oxford English Dictionary was the first modern English dictionary ever made and it set a new standard for what dictionaries would be from then on. To this date, it is considered "the ultimate authority on the usage and meaning of English words and phrases, unparalleled in its accuracy and comprehensiveness".
Curious Facts:
One of the thousands of contributors of the OED was Fritzeward Hall, who spoke nine languages and "wrote every single day ... with sheet after sheet of proofs, corrected, changed, closely read and carefully parsed."
William Chester Minor was also a prolific contributor. He was a retired United States Army surgeon and was, at the time of his contribution, imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. His story was told in book The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words, written by Simon Winchester, first published in England in 1998 and then retitled The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary in the United States and Canada (the 'professor' of the American title is James Murray).
Author J.R.R. Tolkien worked on the making OED. He was employed in 1919 and concentrated mostly on letter "W" (warm, wasp, water, wick, wallop, waggle, winter). He said that during the time he worked on the OED, he learned more "than (at) any other equal period of my life."
According to book “The Meaning Of Everything - The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary”, also by Simon Winchester, to Murray the hardest word was “set”. “Black” was also a difficult one, taking one assistant three months to work out.
The very last word in the 1928 edition was zyxt: a Kentish word, past participle of the verb to see.
Sources and related links:
Trench Anniversary, by Peter Gilliver, Associate Editor of OED
http://www.philsoc.org.uk/history.asp
History of the OED
http://www.oed.com/public/oedhistory
Origins of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (1857)
http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php?id=3400
Oxford English Dictionary
http://my-bankruptcy-help.com/?b=Oxford_English_Dictionary#cite_note-2
History of the Oxford English Dictionary, OED
http://wordinfo.info/unit/4420/ip:4/il:H
Oxford English Dictionary
http://my-bankruptcy-help.com/?b=Oxford_English_Dictionary#cite_note-2
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on Murray
http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/dnb/35163.html
The Origin of – Oxford Dictionary
http://www.theoriginof.com/oxford-dictionary.html
The Meaning of Everything – Review
http://www.ralphmag.org/CI/oed.html
How a new word enters the Oxford English Dictionary:
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/02/how-new-word-enters-dictionary/
About the OED
http://oed.com/public/about;jsessionid=4DEC019A8646FA6178E3066784268FB1
In the study, Trench identified seven distinct shortcomings in contemporary dictionaries:
- Incomplete coverage of obsolete words
- Inconsistent coverage of families of related words
- Incorrect dates for earliest use of words
- History of obsolete senses of words often omitted
- Inadequate distinction among synonyms
- Insufficient use of good illustrative quotations
- Space wasted on inappropriate or redundant content.
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The first head of the project, Richard Chenevix Trench |
Richard Chenevix Trench organized the early stages of the project but was not able to continue it. Herbert Coleridge became the first editor. On 12th May, 1860, Coleridge’s dictionary plan was published and his team started the research. He made his house his first office. In May 1861, Herbert Coleridge died of tuberculosis.
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| Editor Frederick Furnivall, 1825–1910 |
Furnivall managed to recruit over 800 volunteers to read texts and record quotations. In the end, he handed over nearly two tons of quotation slips and other materials to his successor, James Murray, who became the editor in 1870.
 |
| James Murray, editor and philologist |
When Murray became the editor, there was no defined publisher for the gigantic dictionary. Only in 1878 did Furnivall and Murray find a publisher that agreed with the project: Oxford University Press. It took 20 years for the colossus project to have a publisher. And it would only be completed 50 years later.
The first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was published in February of 1884 and covered from “A” to “Ant”. In the first seven years of work, the editors didn't get past the letter "b". The dictionary’s ambitious intention was to record every word used in English since 1150 and trace it back through all its shifting meanings, spellings and uses to its earliest recorded appearance, plus at least one citation for each century of its existence. In the end, it became twenty ponderous volumes long, with 615,000 entries; 2,412,000 supporting quotations, and 60,000,000 words.
The Oxford English Dictionary was the first modern English dictionary ever made and it set a new standard for what dictionaries would be from then on. To this date, it is considered "the ultimate authority on the usage and meaning of English words and phrases, unparalleled in its accuracy and comprehensiveness".
Curious Facts:
According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to 'key in' the text to convert the 59 million words in the second edition of OED into machine readable format, followed by 60 years of proofreading and requiring 540 megabytes of electornic storage space.
One of the thousands of contributors of the OED was Fritzeward Hall, who spoke nine languages and "wrote every single day ... with sheet after sheet of proofs, corrected, changed, closely read and carefully parsed."
William Chester Minor was also a prolific contributor. He was a retired United States Army surgeon and was, at the time of his contribution, imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. His story was told in book The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words, written by Simon Winchester, first published in England in 1998 and then retitled The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary in the United States and Canada (the 'professor' of the American title is James Murray).
Author J.R.R. Tolkien worked on the making OED. He was employed in 1919 and concentrated mostly on letter "W" (warm, wasp, water, wick, wallop, waggle, winter). He said that during the time he worked on the OED, he learned more "than (at) any other equal period of my life."
According to book “The Meaning Of Everything - The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary”, also by Simon Winchester, to Murray the hardest word was “set”. “Black” was also a difficult one, taking one assistant three months to work out.
The very last word in the 1928 edition was zyxt: a Kentish word, past participle of the verb to see.
Sources and related links:
Trench Anniversary, by Peter Gilliver, Associate Editor of OED
http://www.philsoc.org.uk/history.asp
History of the OED
http://www.oed.com/public/oedhistory
Origins of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (1857)
http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php?id=3400
Oxford English Dictionary
http://my-bankruptcy-help.com/?b=Oxford_English_Dictionary#cite_note-2
History of the Oxford English Dictionary, OED
http://wordinfo.info/unit/4420/ip:4/il:H
Oxford English Dictionary
http://my-bankruptcy-help.com/?b=Oxford_English_Dictionary#cite_note-2
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on Murray
http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/dnb/35163.html
The Origin of – Oxford Dictionary
http://www.theoriginof.com/oxford-dictionary.html
The Meaning of Everything – Review
http://www.ralphmag.org/CI/oed.html
How a new word enters the Oxford English Dictionary:
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/02/how-new-word-enters-dictionary/
About the OED
http://oed.com/public/about;jsessionid=4DEC019A8646FA6178E3066784268FB1
The Future of Dictionaries
In this video, lexicographer Erin McKean discusses the profession of lexicographer and the future of dictionaries in a very humorous way .
In her lecture, she talks about the evolution of language and the shortcomings of traditional dictionaries. McKean looks at the many ways in which today's print dictionary is poised for transformation and how online dictionaries are flat and just “paper thrown up on a screen”, replicating paper dictionaries characteristics.
McKean has been working on an entirely new sort of online dictionary to address some of those shortcomings. Her project is called Wordnik and it is available on the site http://www.wordnik.com/. With more than 4 billion words of text (taken from web pages, books, magazines, newspapers, etc.), it takes the dictionary beyond paper and brings words and definitions that are in "traditional" dictionaries and ones that have not made it there yet. It is based on the principle that people learn words best by seeing them in context.
In the words of Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, Wordnik is "a crowdsourced toolkit for tracking and recording the evolution of language as it occurs, its goal is to gather as much information about a word as possible — not its mere definition, but also in-sentence examples, semantic “neighborhoods” of related words, images, statistics about usage, and more." The project is led by Joe Hyrkin, Erin McKean, Roger McNamee, Tony Tam, and Mark Wong-VanHaren.
Wordnik is an indication of how the internet can influence and change dictionaries in the future, with speakers working side by side with lexicographers to make dictionaries almost real-time organisms of the language.
It is a long way from Samuel Johnson’s progress of including words like cat and hat in his dictionary and therefore changing radically the path of lexicography. And It is also a reminder that the history of English dictionaries still has many pages to be written.
(By the way, McKean’s favorite word is erinaceous: "Of the Hedgehog family; like, or characteristic of, a hedgehog.")
In her lecture, she talks about the evolution of language and the shortcomings of traditional dictionaries. McKean looks at the many ways in which today's print dictionary is poised for transformation and how online dictionaries are flat and just “paper thrown up on a screen”, replicating paper dictionaries characteristics.
McKean has been working on an entirely new sort of online dictionary to address some of those shortcomings. Her project is called Wordnik and it is available on the site http://www.wordnik.com/. With more than 4 billion words of text (taken from web pages, books, magazines, newspapers, etc.), it takes the dictionary beyond paper and brings words and definitions that are in "traditional" dictionaries and ones that have not made it there yet. It is based on the principle that people learn words best by seeing them in context.
In the words of Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, Wordnik is "a crowdsourced toolkit for tracking and recording the evolution of language as it occurs, its goal is to gather as much information about a word as possible — not its mere definition, but also in-sentence examples, semantic “neighborhoods” of related words, images, statistics about usage, and more." The project is led by Joe Hyrkin, Erin McKean, Roger McNamee, Tony Tam, and Mark Wong-VanHaren.
Wordnik is an indication of how the internet can influence and change dictionaries in the future, with speakers working side by side with lexicographers to make dictionaries almost real-time organisms of the language.
It is a long way from Samuel Johnson’s progress of including words like cat and hat in his dictionary and therefore changing radically the path of lexicography. And It is also a reminder that the history of English dictionaries still has many pages to be written.
(By the way, McKean’s favorite word is erinaceous: "Of the Hedgehog family; like, or characteristic of, a hedgehog.")
List of Links - Online Dictionaries
Cambridge Dictionary
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
Link to Cambridge University Press dictionaries for learners of English. Users may research the dictionaries.
BYU Corpus of American English
http://www.americancorpus.org/
When it was released in February 2008, the BYU Corpus of American English contained more than 360 million words. Created by Mark Davies of Brigham Young University, this massive word bank allows users to find the frequency of particular words and phrases (in context) and to trace syntactic changes and semantic shifts over the past 80 years.
British National Corpus
http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/
Also designed by Mark Davies, this site enables users to sort, search, count, and compare the 100 million words in the British National Corpus.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
Link to Cambridge University Press dictionaries for learners of English. Users may research the dictionaries.
BYU Corpus of American English
http://www.americancorpus.org/
When it was released in February 2008, the BYU Corpus of American English contained more than 360 million words. Created by Mark Davies of Brigham Young University, this massive word bank allows users to find the frequency of particular words and phrases (in context) and to trace syntactic changes and semantic shifts over the past 80 years.
British National Corpus
http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/
Also designed by Mark Davies, this site enables users to sort, search, count, and compare the 100 million words in the British National Corpus.
Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language
http://www.dil.ie/
A digital edition of the complete contents of the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language based mainly on Old and Middle Irish materials.
Electronic Middle English Dictionary
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/
It brings 15,000 pages with a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage of English in the 1100-1500 period, based on the analysis of a collection of over three million citation slips, the largest collection of this kind available.
http://www.dil.ie/
A digital edition of the complete contents of the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language based mainly on Old and Middle Irish materials.
Electronic Middle English Dictionary
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/
It brings 15,000 pages with a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage of English in the 1100-1500 period, based on the analysis of a collection of over three million citation slips, the largest collection of this kind available.
Macmillan Dictionary
http://www.macmillandictionary.com/
The focus on Global English is one of the distinguishing features of the site from Macmillan Publishers.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
http://oxforddictionaries.com/
Dictionary by Oxford University Press.
The GNU (General Public License) Project's publication of CIDE, the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
Urban Dictionary
http://www.macmillandictionary.com/
The focus on Global English is one of the distinguishing features of the site from Macmillan Publishers.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
http://oxforddictionaries.com/
Dictionary by Oxford University Press.
The GNU version of The Collaborative International Dictionary of English
http://www.ibiblio.org/webster/The GNU (General Public License) Project's publication of CIDE, the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
Urban Dictionary
http://www.urbandictionary.com/
"A veritable cornucopia of streetwise lingo, posted and defined by its readers."
Visual Dictionary Online
http://visual.merriam-webster.com/
Visual Dictionary Online by Merriam-Webster: "Search the themes to quickly locate words, or find the meaning of a word by viewing the image it represents."
Wordnet
"A veritable cornucopia of streetwise lingo, posted and defined by its readers."
Visual Dictionary Online
http://visual.merriam-webster.com/
Visual Dictionary Online by Merriam-Webster: "Search the themes to quickly locate words, or find the meaning of a word by viewing the image it represents."
Webster
Web page developed by the University of Chicago that allows you to view both the 1828 and 1913 editions of Webster's Dictionary and compare results.
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
A lexical database of English that can be downloaded.
A project of online dictionary with over 4 billion words that shows examples of sentences to show words in context, information on the word's frequency and use patterns, related words and is also open for contribution with the recording of pronunciations, pointing us towards new words, adding tags and related words, and leaving notes.
A lexical database of English that can be downloaded.
Wordnik
http://www.wordnik.com/A project of online dictionary with over 4 billion words that shows examples of sentences to show words in context, information on the word's frequency and use patterns, related words and is also open for contribution with the recording of pronunciations, pointing us towards new words, adding tags and related words, and leaving notes.
List of Links - The History of English Dictionaries
Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/ret/cawdrey/cawdrey0.html#d
An online transcription organized by Raymond G. Siemens of the first English dictionary (A Table Alphabeticall, by Robert Cawdrey), published in 1604.
Article from New Yorker magazine on the Virginia Mountweazel story and false entries in dictionaries.
Guide to Samuel Johnson
http://ethnicity.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Johnson/Guide/
An online guide to Samuel Johnson, author of Dictionary of the English Language (1755), written by the specialist Jack Lynch, editor of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work That Defined the English Language (New York: Walker & Company, 2004).
Transcription of a lecture by Jack Lynch delivered on August, 25, 2005 at the Johnson and the English Language conference, Birmingham.
Disgraced by Miscarriage: Four and a Half Centuries of Lexicographical Belligerence
http://ejbe.libraries.rutgers.edu/index.php/jrul/article/view/782/2005
Article on pdf format written by Jack Lynch on the quarrels that have made the history of English dictionaries.
Article on dictionary.com about Samuel Johnson.
Words Count
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/apr/02/classics.wordsandlanguage
An article on Samuel Johnson from British newspaper The Guardian on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Johnson's dictionary.
The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page
http://www.samueljohnson.com/index.html
A collection of Samuel Johnson quotations and also articles on Johnson's biograhpy, his political views, a time line, pictures and a list of books by and about him. The page brings the information that Johnson is the second most quoted person in the English language, after Shakespeare.
Johnson's Dictionary Online
http://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com
An ongoing and extensive project of digitalization of Samuel Johnson's dictionary. It also offers materials on Johnson's life and work, on the history of English language and on grammar.
On Language: Lexicographer
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/magazine/14ONLANGUAGE.html
A NY Times article on the Lexicographer profession.
JOHNSON'S DICTIONARY.; Samuel's, Also, but an American Work and the First
http://query.nytimes.co/gst/abstract.html?res=9D0DEEDB1030E333A25756C1A9669D94699ED7CF
A 1898 article from the New York Times about the 100th anniversary of the first American dictionary
The First American Dictionary: Johnson or Webster?
http://blog.oup.com/2009/01/samuel-johnson/
Post on the Oxford University Press's blog about the first American dictionary and the misconception envolving Noah Webster.
Dictionary Society of North America
http://www.dictionarysociety.com/
The site of the Dictionary Society of North America, an organization that brings together people interested in dictionary making, study, collection, and use.
At the Dictionary Society of North America, words matter — a lot
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/06/11/at-the-dictionary-society-of-north-america-words-matter-%E2%80%94%C2%A0a-lot/
A National Post article on the Dictionary Society of North America
The site presents a brief timeline of the history of English dictionaries and texts on the more important ones. The author is Dr. Alec Gill, an historian, university lecturer, video producer, free-lance writer, psychologist and public speaker.
Philological Society of London
http://www.philsoc.org.uk/
The Society responsible for the project that ended up in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary
Article written by Peter Gilliver, Associate Editor of OED, on Richard Chenevix Trench (file in word format available for download after clicking on "Trench" in the left column)
History of the OED
http://www.oed.com/public/oedhistory
Article on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary
Origins of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (1857)
Article on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
http://my-bankruptcy-help.com/?b=Oxford_English_Dictionary#cite_note-2
Article on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary
History of the Oxford English Dictionary, OED
http://wordinfo.info/unit/4420/ip:4/il:H
Article on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
http://my-bankruptcy-help.com/?b=Oxford_English_Dictionary#cite_note-2
Article on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/dnb/35163.html
Biography of James Murray by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The Origin of – Oxford Dictionary
http://www.theoriginof.com/oxford-dictionary.html
Article on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary
The Meaning of Everything – Review
http://www.ralphmag.org/CI/oed.html
Article on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary
How a new word enters the Oxford English Dictionary:
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/02/how-new-word-enters-dictionary/
Curious fact: new words and the Oxford Dictionary
About the OED
http://oed.com/public/about;jsessionid=4DEC019A8646FA6178E3066784268FB1
Official version of the Oxford English Dictionary history
Early English Text Society
http://library.truman.edu/microforms/english_text.asp
Article on the society founded in 1864 by Frederick Furnivall to republish unprinted early English literature to help with the quotation selection for the Oxford Dictionary. It reprinted works that in the time were already printed elsewhere but were unobtainable except in limited and expensive editions.
The Dictionary Wars - Noah Webster
http://www.historyhouse.com/c/in_history/?webster
Article on the "dictionary war" between G. & C. Merriam and Noah Webster. It has a part II and a part III.
British Library
http://www.bl.uk/
Institution that houses every publication in Britain and includes a museum.
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/ret/cawdrey/cawdrey0.html#d
An online transcription organized by Raymond G. Siemens of the first English dictionary (A Table Alphabeticall, by Robert Cawdrey), published in 1604.
Not a Word
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/29/050829ta_talk_alfordArticle from New Yorker magazine on the Virginia Mountweazel story and false entries in dictionaries.
Guide to Samuel Johnson
http://ethnicity.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Johnson/Guide/
An online guide to Samuel Johnson, author of Dictionary of the English Language (1755), written by the specialist Jack Lynch, editor of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work That Defined the English Language (New York: Walker & Company, 2004).
How Johnson's Dictionary Became the First Dictionary
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Papers/firstdict.htmlTranscription of a lecture by Jack Lynch delivered on August, 25, 2005 at the Johnson and the English Language conference, Birmingham.
Disgraced by Miscarriage: Four and a Half Centuries of Lexicographical Belligerence
http://ejbe.libraries.rutgers.edu/index.php/jrul/article/view/782/2005
Article on pdf format written by Jack Lynch on the quarrels that have made the history of English dictionaries.
Did one man write the first great English dictionary all by himself? Not quite, but close
http://hotword.dictionary.com/johnson/Article on dictionary.com about Samuel Johnson.
Words Count
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/apr/02/classics.wordsandlanguage
An article on Samuel Johnson from British newspaper The Guardian on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Johnson's dictionary.
The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page
http://www.samueljohnson.com/index.html
A collection of Samuel Johnson quotations and also articles on Johnson's biograhpy, his political views, a time line, pictures and a list of books by and about him. The page brings the information that Johnson is the second most quoted person in the English language, after Shakespeare.
Johnson's Dictionary Online
http://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com
An ongoing and extensive project of digitalization of Samuel Johnson's dictionary. It also offers materials on Johnson's life and work, on the history of English language and on grammar.
On Language: Lexicographer
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/magazine/14ONLANGUAGE.html
A NY Times article on the Lexicographer profession.
JOHNSON'S DICTIONARY.; Samuel's, Also, but an American Work and the First
http://query.nytimes.co/gst/abstract.html?res=9D0DEEDB1030E333A25756C1A9669D94699ED7CF
A 1898 article from the New York Times about the 100th anniversary of the first American dictionary
The First American Dictionary: Johnson or Webster?
http://blog.oup.com/2009/01/samuel-johnson/
Post on the Oxford University Press's blog about the first American dictionary and the misconception envolving Noah Webster.
Dictionary Society of North America
http://www.dictionarysociety.com/
The site of the Dictionary Society of North America, an organization that brings together people interested in dictionary making, study, collection, and use.
At the Dictionary Society of North America, words matter — a lot
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/06/11/at-the-dictionary-society-of-north-america-words-matter-%E2%80%94%C2%A0a-lot/
A National Post article on the Dictionary Society of North America
English Dictionaries by Dr. Alec Gill MBE
http://www.hull.ac.uk/php/cetag/1idictionaries.htmThe site presents a brief timeline of the history of English dictionaries and texts on the more important ones. The author is Dr. Alec Gill, an historian, university lecturer, video producer, free-lance writer, psychologist and public speaker.
Philological Society of London
http://www.philsoc.org.uk/
The Society responsible for the project that ended up in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary
Trench Anniversary, by Peter Gilliver, Associate Editor of OED
http://www.philsoc.org.uk/history.aspArticle written by Peter Gilliver, Associate Editor of OED, on Richard Chenevix Trench (file in word format available for download after clicking on "Trench" in the left column)
History of the OED
http://www.oed.com/public/oedhistory
Article on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary
Origins of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (1857)
Article on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
http://my-bankruptcy-help.com/?b=Oxford_English_Dictionary#cite_note-2
Article on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary
History of the Oxford English Dictionary, OED
http://wordinfo.info/unit/4420/ip:4/il:H
Article on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
http://my-bankruptcy-help.com/?b=Oxford_English_Dictionary#cite_note-2
Article on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/dnb/35163.html
Biography of James Murray by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The Origin of – Oxford Dictionary
http://www.theoriginof.com/oxford-dictionary.html
Article on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary
The Meaning of Everything – Review
http://www.ralphmag.org/CI/oed.html
Article on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary
How a new word enters the Oxford English Dictionary:
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/02/how-new-word-enters-dictionary/
Curious fact: new words and the Oxford Dictionary
About the OED
http://oed.com/public/about;jsessionid=4DEC019A8646FA6178E3066784268FB1
Official version of the Oxford English Dictionary history
Early English Text Society
http://library.truman.edu/microforms/english_text.asp
Article on the society founded in 1864 by Frederick Furnivall to republish unprinted early English literature to help with the quotation selection for the Oxford Dictionary. It reprinted works that in the time were already printed elsewhere but were unobtainable except in limited and expensive editions.
The Dictionary Wars - Noah Webster
http://www.historyhouse.com/c/in_history/?webster
Article on the "dictionary war" between G. & C. Merriam and Noah Webster. It has a part II and a part III.
British Library
http://www.bl.uk/
Institution that houses every publication in Britain and includes a museum.
Noah Webster, Founding Father
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/books/review/book-review-the-forgotten-founding-father-noah-websters-obsession-and-the-creation-of-an-american-culture-by-joshua-kendall.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Article on Noah Webster and his work.
The Webster House and West Hartford Historical Society
http://noahwebsterhouse.org/discover/noah-webster-history.htm
Museum set up at the house where Noah Webster was born. Plenty of biographical information about him.
Noah Webster's Conservative Radicalism
http://mje.mcgill.ca/index.php/MJE/article/view/7578/5508
Article by Sandra Tomkin for the McGill Journal of Education
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/books/review/book-review-the-forgotten-founding-father-noah-websters-obsession-and-the-creation-of-an-american-culture-by-joshua-kendall.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Article on Noah Webster and his work.
The Webster House and West Hartford Historical Society
http://noahwebsterhouse.org/discover/noah-webster-history.htm
Museum set up at the house where Noah Webster was born. Plenty of biographical information about him.
Noah Webster's Conservative Radicalism
http://mje.mcgill.ca/index.php/MJE/article/view/7578/5508
Article by Sandra Tomkin for the McGill Journal of Education
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