Sixteenth Century English Dictionaries

This is the first of three volumes offering a new history of lexicography in and beyond the early modern British Isles. This volume focuses on the period from the end of the Middle Ages to the year 1600, exploring the first printed dictionaries, Latin and foreign language dictionaries, and specialized English wordlists.

This is the first of three volumes offering a new history of lexicography in and beyond the early modern British Isles. This volume focuses on the period from the end of the Middle Ages to the year 1600, exploring the first printed dictionaries, Latin and foreign language dictionaries, and specialized English wordlists.

This is the first volume in the trilogy Dictionaries in the English-Speaking World, 1500-1800, which will offer a new history of lexicography in and beyond the early modern British Isles. The volume explores the dictionaries, wordlists, and glossaries that were compiled and read by speakers of English from the end of the Middle Ages to the year 1600. These include the first printed dictionaries in which English words were collected; the dictionaries of Latin used by all educated English-speakers, from young children to Shakespeare to adult royalty; the dictionaries of modern languages that gave English-speakers access to the languages and cultures of continental Europe; dictionaries and wordlists documenting other languages from Armenian to Malagasy to Welsh; and a great variety of specialized English wordlists. No unified history has ever surveyed this vast, lively, and culturally significant lexicographical output before. The guiding principle of the book, and the trilogy, is that a story about dictionaries must also be a story about human beings. John Considine offers a full and sympathetic account of those who compiled and used these works, and those who supported them financially, paying particular attention to records of dictionary use and its traces in surviving copies. The volume will appeal to all those interested in the languages and literary cultures of the sixteenth-century English-speaking world.

This work tells the story of the first European wordlists of minority and unofficial languages and dialects, from the end of the Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century. It explores not just the languages and the wordlists themselves, but also the lives of those who created them and their motivations.

New cover design - all titles in the Partridge collection now have the same style covers. Group shot of titles will be made available, together with an order form The first edition had life sales of over 19000 copies (hardback), the second edition sold out after selling 6000 copies (hardback) and the paperback has sold nearly 5000 copies in 2 editions

Medical practitioners of the sixteenth century had their own body of special terms, just like the doctors of this century. McConchie here examines medical terminology used in a selection of thirteen medical works published between 1530 and 1612, and compares it with the treatment of these words in the OED and other dictionaries of today. His study reveals errors, omissions, and biases that raise important questions for lexicographical tools in general.

Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: Good, University of Zurich (English Seminar), 10 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The history of dictionaries certainly goes back to the 8th century, when the custom of making collections of glosses grew up. These collections, called glossarium or glossary, were a great help to students, as they were also a sort of dictionary. In the 10th century, Abbot Ælfric produced a Latin grammar book, including a short Latin-English dictionary - the first of its kind. In 1440 Galfridus Grammaticus produced the first English-Latin dictionary which was printed in 1499 by Pynson and bore the title Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum. Until the 16th century, the emphasis of dictionaries lay on translating foreign words into English. Apparently, there was no need for an English-English dictionary, i.e. a dictionary which described English words to English people. In that time a lot of foreign words, mostly Latin ones, made their way into ‘standard’ English, which at first caused no debate but then was criticised by language purists. According to them English was in danger of being taken over by foreign languages and needed special support. This idea was the beginning of English-English dictionaries. In 1604 Robert Cawdry brought out his Table Alphabetical. About three thousand ‘hard’ words which had become common in English were listed and explained. Henry Cockeram produced the first work with the title The English Dictionary in 1623. Like other dictionaries of that time, it primarily dealt with ‘difficult’ English words. A polyglot dictionary of eleven languages was published in 1617 by John Minsheu. The Ductor in Linguas was the most monumental dictionary in the 17th century and for the first time, etymology was given some attention. In 1674 John Ray produced a dictionary which dealt with dialect words. It was an unexpected success and people all over the country began looking for additional local terms and sent them to Ray, who brought out a second and enlarged edition of this dictionary in 1691. John Ray can be regarded as the “remote originator of the English Dialect Society” (Mathews 1966, p. 26). Until then, dictionaries followed the line of old glossaries and only dealt with terms which were not common or rather unusual in the English language. This changed in the 18th century when the first attempts to publish dictionaries containing all English words were made. In 1702 John Kersey published A New English Dictionary; or, a complete collection of the most proper and significant words, commonly used in the language... [...]

Adventuring in Dictionaries: New Studies in the History of Lexicography brings together seventeen papers on the making of dictionaries from the sixteenth century to the present day. The first five treat English and French lexicography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Heberto Fernandez and Monique Cormier discuss the outside matter of French–English bilingual dictionaries; Kusujiro Miyoshi re-assesses the influence of Robert Cawdrey; John Considine uncovers the biography of Henry Cockeram; Antonella Amatuzzi discusses Pierre Borel’s use of his predecessors; and Fredric Dolezal investigates multi-word units in the dictionary of John Wilkins and William Lloyd. Linda Mitchell’s account of dictionaries as behaviour guides in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries leads on to Giovanni Iamartino’s presentation of words associated with women in the dictionary of Samuel Johnson, and Thora Van Male’s of the ornaments in the Encyclopédie. Nineteenth-century and subsequent topics are treated by Anatoly Liberman on the growth of the English etymological dictionary; Julie Coleman on dictionaries of rhyming slang; Laura Pinnavaia on Richardson’s New Dictionary and the changing vocabulary of English; Peter Gilliver on early editorial decisions and reconsiderations in the making of the Oxford English Dictionary; Anne Dykstra on the use of Latin as the metalanguage in Joost Halbertsma’s Lexicon Frisicum; Laura Santone on the “Dictionnaire critique” serialized in Georges Bataille’s Surrealist review Documents; Sylvia Brown on the stories of missionary lexicography behind the Eskimo–English Dictionary of 1925; and Michael Adams on the legacies of the Early Modern English Dictionary project. The diverse critical perspectives of the leading lexicographers and historians of lexicography who contribute to this volume are united by a shared interest in the close reading of dictionaries, and a shared concern with the making and reading of dictionaries as human activities, which cannot be understood without attention to the lives of the people who undertook them.