Oxford English Dictionary Online -2000

The very idea of the 'Oxford English Dictionary' is enormously complicated - if its aim is to record every significant word in the history of the English language, then it can never rest. The English language is constantly evolving and mutating, and in a world packed with text messages, websites, science fiction, technological advances, new fashions, pop genres and foods, the growth of language is going haywire, and the lexicographers have their work cut out.

New technology

Online dictionaries surely embody the future for word browsers. New technologies allow word definitions and their histories to be conjured up with the click of a mouse. And now, instead of having to print new books each time the dictionary is updated, the online version can be altered with relative speed and ease. In fact every 3 months the lexicographers at the OED add 1800 new and revised words to the online dictionary.

New functions

The 'Oxford English Dictionary online' holds many other advantages over the paper version. Timeline diagrams can be revealed to show the points through history at which a word has shifted in meaning. Words can be listed by date, with a column showing all the words that have appeared in any particular year. You can search for a word when you know the meaning but have forgotten the word. And you can search for quotations from a particular book or author, or for words that derive from a particular language. In other words, thanks to this amazingly complex website, the whole map of the English language is much easier to discern.

An easier job for OED readers

Teams of readers in the UK and USA are still ploughing through texts to find unrecorded examples of words - old and new. Of course, computers have sped up the process enormously, and have made the task of lexicographers much easier. Entire texts can now be searched in minutes rather than days, and thanks to enormous databases of words and quotations a researcher can quickly discover how many meanings a word has, how frequently those meanings are used, and in what context.

With thanks to the OED for kindly granting us permission to use these extracts. Find out more at OED online.

Allsopp's Caribbean Dictionary -1996

The 'Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage' was compiled by Richard Allsopp, and was first published in 1996. It records a rich variety of words spoken in land scattered over 1 million square miles. While many of these words might sound strange (spranksious means bold or good-looking; a do-flicky is a gadget or tool), others such as suck (to experience hardship) and kill (to make ache with laughter) have become, for many of us in Britain, part of a familiar vocabulary.

The status of Caribbean English

In the introduction to the dictionary Allsopp explains that, for decades, teachers and employers in the English-speaking Caribbean had complained about the 'poor standard of English' used by the public. However, since the 1960s, scholars have recognised that these alternative versions of English have a validity of their own. Allsopp outlines the kind of questions that must be asked by the lexicographer of Caribbean English: What is the right/wrong  way to speak English in the Caribbea; How should local or regional words be judged, and who should judge them - Britain, North America, the 'international' community, other Caribbean states, teachers? Allsopp believed that a dictionary of Caribbean English usage would help to fix and promote the words and phrases used in these regions, words that are different from 'official' English but that are, in the Caribbean, essential components of everyday life.

Word gathering

The process of collecting words for the dictionary was complicated. Words were taken from a wide range of written sources: Caribbean literature, local histories, guidebooks, court records, folk songs and music collections. Also, a team of researchers carried out workshops, recording voices in 22 regions (from Guyana to Belize) speaking on a range of subjects - including architecture, nature, children's games, folk medicines, weddings, industry, and superstitions.

Richard Allsopp is linguistics scholar, and formerly worked at the University of the West Indies, Barbados.

Rosten's Joys of Yiddish -1968

'The Joys of Yiddish' presents a rich collection of words from a language that has been moving around the world for the last 1000 years. The book records the Yiddish words that have imprinted themselves on to the English language, following the huge migration of Jewish communities to America and England during the 19th and 20th centuries. For many of us today, words such as schmaltz, shmooz, orchutzpa are part of a familiar, everyday vocabulary.

The origins of Yiddish

Yiddish is the language of the Ashkenazim, the Jews of central and Eastern Europe. It is a mixture of German, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, Romanian, and Ukrainian. Scholars believe it first arose in the Rhineland among Jewish settlers from France. There the Jews adapted the German language into a new vernacular, picking up German words orally, and spelling them out phonetically using the Hebrew alphabet. These words were then mixed with Hebrew names and phrases, and moulded into a new tongue. While Hebrew was the sacred language of worship, Yiddish was the everyday spoken language used in the street, the marketplace and the home.

A language on the move

Yiddish is a magpie language. As the Jews have fled persecution over the last 1000 years, so the language has grown, gathering up words as and where temporary homes were made. Historically, Jewish ghettos have acted as incubators of Yiddish - segregated communities have needed to create a homogeneous language for themselves. However, Rosten is writing about the development of Yiddish in late 20th century America, a largely assimilated culture. In this environment Yiddish words have become embedded into everyday English: Rosten observes that a new language - Yinglish - is now encountered everywhere from movies and nightclubs to bus-stops and grocery stores.

Oxford English Dictionary 1879 - 1928

The idea for this enormously complex dictionary was first dreamt up in the 1850s. The plan was to create a vast and comprehensive collection of English words, those from the Early Middle English period (1150) onwards, a lexicon of the language more complete than any English dictionary-maker had ever attempted.

Lexicographers' gaps

The idea was formulated by the Philological Society, a group that investigated the structure and history of languages - from the dialects of Papuan tribes to the lingo of Australian emigrants. In 1857, recognising the gaps that existed in other English dictionaries, the society decided that a new project should examine the whole treasure trove of English words, including those that had been rejected or left unnoticed by other lexicographers.

The New English Dictionary

In 1879 an agreement was reached with Oxford University Press to begin work on a New English Dictionary. The dictionary would include lost and outmoded words as well as the newest fashionable or technical terms; it would trace the history (or etymology) of every word, showing the earliest known usage of each word, and would map how the word had shifted in meaning over time; it would show word families, pronunciations and multiple meanings; and it would search through a whole range of literature taking its quotations from texts previously thought to be insignificant. No one realised at this stage that it would be more than fifty years before the first version of the dictionary - 178 miles of type - was published.

Readers as volunteers

The dictionary's editor, James Murray, appealed to readers around the English speaking world to get involved. Eventually hundreds of volunteers were working as word detectives, scouring historical and contemporary texts to collect evidence for as many words as possible. They rummaged through literature (popular and classic), newspapers, specialist scientific or technological journals, song sheets, theatre scripts, recipe books, wills, and political documents, collecting a myriad of words and meanings. The readers sent millions of quotations to Murray, which were then checked, sorted and filed by his team of editors.

Murray's research

Murray corresponded regularly with a fascinating array of experts: as his daughter has recalled, in a single day Murray wrote to Kew Gardens enquiring about the origins of an exotic plant, to a quay-side merchant in Newcastle about the keels on the Tyne, to a the Astronomical Society about a constellation, to the Times regarding the first citation of the drink punch, to the chief Rabbi, and to Thomas Hardy - all in an unceasing search for the meaning and origins of words.

With thanks to the OED for kindly granting us permission to use these extracts. Find out more at OED online.

Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue -1785

 

Francis Grose's 'Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue' was first published in 1785, and is a dictionary of slang words. Grose was one of the first lexicographers to collect slang words from all corners of society, not just from the professional underworld of pickpockets and bandits. So while 'The Vulgar Tongue' includes many of the words found in earlier 'scoundrels'' dictionaries (such as Head's 'Canting Academy'), it also lists a whole range of mundane slang words such assheepish (for bashful), carrots (for red hair), or sweet (for expert, dexterous, clever). He records many rude words, such as bum fodder(for toilet paper), or double jugg (for a man's bottom). And he includes many nicknames for food and drink - words for gin (an enormously popular drink at the time) include: blue ruin, cobblers punch, crank, diddle, frog's wine, heart's ease, lightening and drain.

Collecting rude words

Grose and his assistant Tom Cocking took midnight walks through London, picking up slang words in slums, drinking dens and dockyards and adding them into their 'knowledge-box'. 'The Vulgar Tongue' was recognised throughout the 19th century as one of the most important collections of slang in the English language, and it would strongly influence later dictionaries of this kind.

About Grose

Grose, born in 1730, liked to eat rich foods and to drink port. He also liked to tell stories. A very fat man, he took pleasure in the pun linking his name to his size. He had a classical education before going on to study drawing. He was a member of the Society of Antiquaries and was made a captain in the Surrey Militia in 1778. However, he is best known for his work as a lexicographer.

Johnson's Dictionary -1755

Samuel Johnson's 'Dictionary of the English Language' is one of the most famous dictionaries in history. First published in 1755, the dictionary took just over eight years to compile, required six helpers, and listed 40,000 words. Each word was defined in detail, the definitions illustrated with quotations covering every branch of learning. It was a huge scholarly achievement, a more extensive and complex dictionary than any of its predecessors - and the comparable French Dictionnarre had taken 55 years to compile and required the dedication of 40 scholars.

Literary quotations

In all, there are over 114,000 quotations in the dictionary. Johnson was the first English lexicographer to use citations in this way, a method that greatly influenced the style of future dictionaries. He had scoured books stretching back to the 1500s, often quoting from those thought to be 'great works' such as Milton or Shakespeare. Thus the quotations reflect his literary taste and his rightwing political views. However, if Johnson didn't like a quotation, or if a phrase didn't convey the exact meaning he required, he did not hesitate to chop, twist around, or rewrite a few words - Johnson famously scribbled all over his books, underlining, highlighting, altering and correcting the words, much to the horror of acquaintances who had lent him their books!

A tangled mess

A group of London book-sellers had commissioned Johnson's dictionary, hoping that a book of this kind would help stabilise the rules governing the English language. In the preface to the book Johnson writes of the 'energetic' unruliness of the English tongue. In his view, the language was in a mess, and was in desperate need of some discipline: 'wherever I turned my view', he wrote, 'there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated.' However, in the process of compiling the dictionary, Johnson recognised that language is impossible to fix, because of its constantly changing nature, and that his role was to record the language of the day, rather than to form it.

Johnson's personal touch

Even so, many of Johnson's definitions bear the mark of a rather pompous man (but also quite a humorous one). Many of the words he included were incomprehensible to the average reader - long words such as ‘deosculation’, ‘odontalgick’. He is even believed to have made up some words. His definition of oats is very rude to the Scots. He defines the word as 'A Grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.' Johnson was criticised for imposing his personality on to the book. However, his dictionary was enormously popular and highly respected for its epic sense of scholarship.

Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum -1730

Nathan Bailey's 'Dictionarium Britannicum' was first published in 1730. It contains 48,000 words. Bailey's dictionaries were extremely popular: they were larger and more comprehensive than any other dictionaries of the day, and they also sold more copies. Samuel Johnson owned a copy which he scribbled over, underlining sections and adding his own ideas. It would later help him to write his own dictionary.

An array of words

Bailey includes words from all corners of society in his lexicon - 'hard and technical words', those found in arts, sciences and 'mysteries', words used in anything from anatomy and cosmography to cookery and handicrafts, from painting and optics to meteorology, navigation and philosophy. Unusually, he also includes names of people and of places in Britain. The dictionary is designed for a wide range of readers, having been compiled, writes Bailey, 'as well for the Entertainment of the Curious, as the Information of the Ignorant, and for the Benefit of young Students, Artificers, Tradesmen and Foreigners, who are desirous thorowly to understand what they Speak, Read, or Write.'

New techniques

Many of Bailey's methods would later become important dictionary-making conventions. For example, Bailey explored the origins of words, for which he drew on his knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and Latin; he provided advice on pronunciation; and he attempted to compile a more complete list of words than any other English dictionary writer before him, squeezing in not only specialist or 'hard' words, but also dialect, slang and taboo words. The fact that he included rude or slang words shows that his work was far ahead of its time - such words were left out of most non-slang dictionaries until well into the 19th century.

Bailey ran a boarding school in Stepney where he taught Hebrew, Greek and Latin.

Blount's Glossographia -1656 -

Thomas Blount's 'Glossographia' was first published in 1656 andlists over 11,000 words. Blount defined words derived from Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Saxon, Turkish, French and Spanish. He also explained specialist words - those used in fields such as mathematics, anatomy, war, music and architecture. In the preface to the dictionary, Blount explains how he had often stumbled over these words in books, without completely understanding them. He believed the 'Glossographia' would be 'very useful for all such as desire to understand what they read.'

Words in the street

Blount recognised that many of the new words entering the English language were those spoken in the street. He saw that tradesmen and merchants were collecting words as well as wares on their journeys overseas. And therefore many of these new words, such as coffee, chocolate, drapery, boot, omelette or balcony, were those used in shops or other public places - drinking houses, tailors, shoemakers or barbers.

Lexicographer as storyteller

Unlike earlier texts written by Mulcaster and Cawdrey, the 'Glossographia'provided a substantial, and often complex, definition for each word - sometimes Blount seems more like a storyteller than a dictionary-maker. In addition, he often refers to the words' origins (or etymologies). In fact, the 'Glossographia' was the first monolingual English dictionary to explore the origins of words - an approach that paved the way for future lexicographers.

The 'Glossographia' was one of many dictionaries written in the mid 17th century. Dictionaries were growing in popularity during this period, and dictionary makers were experimenting with different techniques.

About Blount

Thomas Blount was born in 1618. He wrote a number of books on a range of subjects - from English law to famous battles. He was particularly interested in languages, and explored all sorts of unusual modes of communication, for example hieroglyphics, symbols, emblems, rhetoric and parables.

Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall -1604

 

Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, was the first single-language English dictionary ever published. It lists approximately 3000 words, defining each one with a simple and brief description. A number of the words listed in the 'Table Alphabeticall' were thought of as 'hard' - or unfamiliar to the general public - as they were derived from foreign or ancient languages such as Hebrew, Greek, Latin or French. The copy displayed on this website is the 3rd edition, published 1813.

A swelling lexicon

During the 16th century a vast number of new words flooded into the English language. This was largely thanks to rich developments in literature, science, medicine and the arts, and a renewed interest in classical languages. Cawdrey describes the peculiar way that well-to-do gentlemen were decorating their sentences with fancy phrases and complicated words from abroad. He says of these people: 'they forget altogether their mothers language, so that if some of their mothers were alive, they were not able to tell or vnderstand what they say.' He writes of how 'far journied gentlemen' collect words on their travels and, coming home, 'pouder their talke with over-sea language.' Cawdrey wanted the English language to be better organised and felt that the 'Table Alphabeticall' would help the reader to understand challenging words.

Ladies, gentlewomen and other unskillfull persons

Cawdrey explained in the first edition of the 'Alphabeticall' that the book was intended to be useful for 'Ladies, gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons. Whereby they may more easily and better vnderstand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in the Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere, and also be made able to vse the same aptly themselues.' Cawdrey hoped the 'Alphabeticall' would help to popularise knowledge itself, and that it would encourage more people to learn to read and write 'properly'. At this time, few girls would have gone to school, and only rich parents could have afforded private tutors. So there were many people who wanted to educate themselves in the basic rules of the English language.

Simplicity

Cawdrey's word definitions were uncomplicated. Unlike later dictionary makers, he did not refer to the great writers of the day, or to the origins of words. Instead the book's simplicity provided help for those who wanted either to have a better understanding of sermons and books, or to learn the 'correct' way to spell.

Mulcaster's Elementarie -1582

Richard Mulcaster’s 'Elementarie' was first published in 1582. It was written as a pedagogical guide, and was an attempt to make English language and culture more respected and accessible. Until the end of the 16th century, Latin had been the traditional language of learning - English was looked down upon by scholars, and only thought to be good enough for popular books and plays. By stabilising the language, Mulcaster hoped that English would be recognised by scholars for its richness and vitality. He wrote ‘I do not think that anie language, be it whatsoever, is better able to utter all arguments, either with more pith, or greater planesse, than our English tung is, if the English utterer be as skillfull in the matter, which he is to utter.’

A list of words

The 'Elementarie' contains a list of 8000 words. Many of these words are familiar today, such as elephant, gunpowder, bum or glitter. Others are more obscure, like brible brable, carpetknight, or flindermouse. None of these words are accompanied by definitions, and therefore the list cannot strictly be classified as a dictionary – there was no such thing as a purely English dictionary at this time. It is, however, an attempt to start to organise the English language. Mulcaster was writing a little over a century after Caxton had introduced printing to England, and yet there was still considerable variation in the way words were spelled, even in print. Mulcaster disapproved intensely of the way the English wrote ‘without anie certain direction,’ claiming that ‘forenners and strangers do wonder at vs, both for the vncertaintie in our writing, and the inconstancie in our letters.’ To solve these problems, Mulcaster wanted to set down some spelling rules such as using an 'e' to distinguish between words like 'mad' and 'made'.

The idea for a dictionary

Although Mulcaster did not write a comprehensive dictionary, he did write in the Elemenatrie of the importance of such a project: ‘It were a thing verie praiseworthie in my opinion…if som one well learned and as laborious a man, wold gather all the words which we use in our English tung…out of all professions, as well learned as not, into one dictionarie, and besides the right writing, which is incident to the Alphabete, wold open vnto us therein, both their naturall force, and their proper use.’

About Richard Mulcaster

Richard Mulcaster, born c.1530, was the headmaster of Merchant Taylors School in London. He was a very unusual teacher, and in many ways revolutionary. He introduced music, physical education and drama into the classroom, believing these disciplines to be as important as reading and writing. His pupils even performed masques for the Queen and her court. Mulcaster also believed in the right for girls to receive an education. Although Mulcaster’s lessons were known for being disciplined and orderly, he was notorious for snoozing at his desk during lessons, while his boys obediently wrote out their lines.