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Dictionaries tell stories of many kinds. The history of dictionaries, of how they were produced, published and used, has much to tell us about the language and the culture of the past. This monumental work of scholarship draws on published and archival material to survey a wide range of dictionaries of western European languages (including English, German, Latin and Greek) published between the early sixteenth and mid -seventeenth centuries. John Considine establishes a powerful model for the social and intellectual history of lexicography by examining dictionaries both as imaginative texts and as scholarly instruments. He tells the stories of national and individual heritage and identity that were created through the making of dictionaries in the early modern period. Far from dry, factual collections of words, dictionaries are creative works, shaping as well as recording early modern culture and intellectual history.

From its initial appearance in 1694 and through successive editions in 1718, 1740, and 1762, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française had risen to become the definitive arbiter of the French language. Preparation of the fifth edition was at an advanced state when the French Revolution began in 1789 but it remained unfinished when the National Convention suppressed academies in August 1793. Seeking to codify the language of the Revolution, the Convention commissioned two Parisian publishers to complete the fifth edition, hoping that it would be a vehicle for promoting the ideals of the Revolution in the manner that the earlier editions had for the values of absolute monarchy. When it appeared during the year VI (1798), however, it was completely anachronistic and barely took note of the Revolution except for a brief supplement of “words in use since the Revolution” that comprised only a small fraction of its content. Another Parisian publisher believed its deficiencies offered an opportunity to publish a competing edition, which he did, along with a partner, in 1802. The holders of the rights to the fifth edition took them to court for piracy, initiating protracted legislation in which they ultimately prevailed. Preparation of the sixth edition had been entrusted to the Institut National and the Napoleonic regime was eager to see it completed, but Bonaparte fell before that occurred. The restored Bourbon dynasty was also eager to see the new edition completed but it was overthrown in 1830. The sixth edition appeared only in 1835 and, similar to the fifth edition it supplanted, it glossed over the Revolution—as well as the Napoleonic period—but in a different manner. Although the dictionary included definitions from the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, it frequently elided the period through the phrase “at a certain epoch.”

A comprehensive and methodologically sophisticated history of Arabic lexicography, this book examines the aims, range, and approaches of the most important writings and writers of lexica specialized in specific topics and multi thematic thesauri, and the lexica arranged according to roots.

Words and dictionaries from the British Isles in historical perspective brings together a wide range of current work on English-language lexicography and lexicology by a team of twelve contributors working in England, continental Europe, and North America. Fredric Dolezal’s opening essay offers a provocative discussion of how the history of English lexicography has been, and might in the future be, written. The next four papers deal with the medieval and early modern periods: Carter Hailey i.

Professor Zgusta's work in lexicography and linguistics proper is built upon a multilingual command of linguistic theory, literary history, the history of linguistics, and his experience as a ›practical‹ lexicographer. The topic under consideration may be the organization and development of a standard variety of a language; explorations of the consequences of linguistic theory on the practical lexicographic applications in making dictionaries that range from Ahtna to Zoque and Batad Ifuagao to Yolngu-Matha; the method of definition in bilingual dictionaries; the state of affairs in Russian lexicography; learner's dictionaries; ancient Greek lexicography; pragmatics; scripts and morphological types; the history of English lexicography; or behind the scenes at the making of the Czech-Chinese dictionary. The reader will not only be offered a careful and wide-ranging study of these important topics in the discipline, but will be taken on a guided comparative and historical tour that illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of current practice and theory. His work reminds those linguists and lexicographers who are locked into ›paradigm‹ battles of the Kuhnian kind that the wheel has already been invented. Most of the articles in this volume have been updated. The editors have also conflated six articles on the history of dictionaries into one seamless narrative with connective tissue supplied by Zgusta.

We all think we know what a dictionary is for and how to use one, so most of us skip the first pages—the front matter—and go right to the words we wish to look up. Yet dictionary users have not always known how English “works” and my book reproduces and examines for the first time important texts in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dictionary authors explain choices and promote ideas to readers, their “end users.” Unlike French, Spanish, and Italian dictionaries compiled during this time and published by national academies, the goal of English dictionaries was usually not to “purify” the language, though some writers did attempt to regularize it. Instead, English lexicographers aimed to teach practical ways for their users to learn English, improve their language skills, even transcend their social class. The anthology strives to be comprehensive in its coverage of the first phase of this tradition from the early seventeenth century—from Robert Cawdrey’s (1604) A Table Alphabeticall, to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), and finally, to Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). The book puts English dictionaries in historical, national, linguistic, literary, cultural contexts, presenting lexicographical trends and the change in the English language over two centuries, and examines how writers attempted to control it by appealing to various pedagogical and legal authorities. Moreover, the development of dictionary and attempts to codify English language and grammar coincided with the arc of the British Empire; the promulgation of “proper” English has been a subject of debate and inquiry for centuries and, in part, dictionaries and the teaching of English historically have been used to present and support ideas about what is correct, regardless of how and where English is actually used. The authors who wrote these texts apply ideas about capitalism, nationalism, sex and social status to favor one language theory over another. I show how dictionaries are not neutral documents: they challenge or promote biases. The book presents and analyzes the history of lexicography, demonstrating how and why dictionaries evolved into the reference books we now often take for granted and we can see that there is no easy answer to the question of “who owns English.”

Fencing schools proliferated on the continent during the sixteenth century. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, the rapier arrived in Britain from Italy and Spain, bringing with it an entirely new fencing style. The Italian style was most prominent throughout the age of the rapier, gradually ceding dominance to the French style of small sword play in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and each new style introduced new vocabulary into English and Scots. This lexis is currently being re-examined as part of the revision programme for the Third Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED3) and this paper considers how modern specialist knowledge of historical fencing may inform the editorial process.

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 C.

El proyecto de elaboración del \"Nuevo diccionario histórico del español\" se concibe desde una nueva perspectiva teórica y metodológica en la que se da cabida a los últimos avances de la lingüística, la informática y la filología con el objetivo de explicar la formación y evolución de las palabras a partir de la “red de relaciones” en las que estas se configuran y que permiten describir e interpretar adecuadamente los procesos de cambio. Este volumen ofrece investigaciones basadas en las nuevas aportaciones de las diferentes ramas de la Lingüística, con el fin de contribuir a que la explicación del desarrollo diacrónico de las unidades léxicas sea lo más adecuada y rigurosa posible.[Texto de la editorial]

This study by Starnes and Noyes was immediately recognized as a unique and pioneering work of scholarship and has long been the standard work on the emergence and early flowering of English lexicography. Within the last 20 years we have been witnessing a remarkable scholarly interest in the study of dictionary-making and the role played by dictionaries in the transmission and preservation of knowledge and learning. It is therefore essential to have this classic work available again to all students of linguistic history. In its new edition the book has been vastly enhanced by a lengthy and invaluable introduction by Gabriele Stein, Professor of English Linguistics in Heidelberg and author of The English Dictionary before Cawdrey (1985). In her introduction to the present volume she sets out in scholarly detail the work that has emerged since 1946, which makes this study of the English dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson as complete as the original authors themselves would have wished.