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:

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.

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.

The cover of an imaginary book made by a group of designers
(click here to learn more)

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.