Dictionary‐making in the English language

Abstract

The publication of the tenth and last volume of the Oxford New English Dictionary on Historical Principles marks the close of seventy years of unparalleled labor and scholarship in dictionary-making. In 1857 Dean (later Archbishop) Trench, in a paper read before the Philological Society, called the society's attention to some deficiencies in existing English dictionaries. As a result of his suggestion, the society the next year began the collection of materials for a new dictionary, and invited Herbert Coleridge to become its first general editor. At time no one conceived the magnitude of the task, nor the time or labor necessary for completing it. The Philological Society did conceive the essential character of the work, however, in its resolve that materials should be collected for a dictionary which, by the completeness of its vocabulary and by the application of the historical method to the life and use of words, might be worthy of the English language and of English scholarship. But this is not a paper on the New English Dictionary. On the contrary, it is to be a brief study of the development of dictionarymaking in the English language during the last three hundred years, including the New English Dictionary and its somewhat less distinguished contemporaries. There are many kinds of dictionaries--dictionaries of words and dictionaries of subjects. This paper is concerned with word books and not with subject books, though the two characters are often combined in the same work.