Bailey and after: illustrating meaning

Abstract

Abstract Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster share their preeminence in the history of English lexicography with a man now almost forgotten, who usually signed his books simply ‘N. Bailey’. Even in his lifetime, Nathan (possibly Nathaniel) Bailey was an obscure figure. There is a record of when he died (1742), but not of when he was born. He belonged to a Seventh Day Baptist congregation in Whitechapel.1 He published several Latin textbooks and translations, incidentally advertising the fact that he was a schoolmaster who learned his educational theories in the c1assroom.2 He may have begun his lexicographical labours with the unsigned Dictionarium rusticum, urbanicum & botanicum (1704; 3rd edition 1726);3 but only with An Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1721 did Bailey really enter literary history. That book long survived its author; dozens of editions appeared throughout the eighteenth century and even into the nineteenth. It was Bailey's dictionary of the English language that first made the ...