An Early Modern English Dictionaries Corpus 1499-1659

Abstract

The Toronto EME dictionary corpus includes six bilingual dictionaries from 1530 to 1611: John Palsgrave's English-French (1530), Sir Thomas Elyot's Latin-English (1538), William Thomas's Italian-English (1550), Thomas Thomas's Latin-English (1587), John Florio's Italian-English (1598), and Randle Cotgrave's French-English (1611). Like so-called hard-word English dictionaries such as Robert Cawdrey's (1604) and even like the mid-seventeenth-century work of Thomas Blount, these illuminate English terms by giving words that are equivalent to them, not words that belong to their analytic definitions, which specify category or genus, and essential features or 'differences', of the things they denoted. Early dictionaries of English do not give referential definitions of the kind we are accustomed to find in dictionaries today. Instead, early lexicographers use and interpretation as the understanding of verbal equivalence (in other words), of etymology, and of denotation. An EME dictionary true to the way in which Renaissance speakers understood meaning, and adequate to our own needs, should not only show which words are equivalent to each lemma, and from which word or words the lemma was thought to come (both matters of meaning important to the period), but should also show and describe, preferably with pictures, those things denoted by those words, a form of knowledge that time has since deprived us of. Although early dictionaries already yield useful antedatings, new senses, and unrecorded words for the revisors of the OED, these books also reflect for readers alive today only what was known about contemporary English then, independent of what we believe now.