English Lexicography

Abstract

The earliest dictionaries in England were bilingual. Their growth in sophistication is associated with the growth of printing technology. The earliest monolingual English dictionary is Cawdrey's Table alphabeticall (1604), a small dictionary of ‘hard words.’ With Nathaniel Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum (1730), the dream of collecting an inventory of all English words first came close to fulfilment. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755) is the next major milestone, with extensive quotations from literature and succinct yet magisterial definitions. Johnson's preface touches on major theoretical issues, some of which were not revisited for another 100 years. The Oxford English dictionary (1884–1928) is universally recognized as a lexicographical masterpiece. It is a record of the English vocabulary on historical principles, i.e., definitions of words that have changed their meanings are arranged in historical order with the oldest first. A new edition is currently in preparation and is being published online in quarterly updates. More practical modern dictionaries, such as Collins English dictionary (1979), place the modern meaning first. Recent editions of older dictionaries, such as Chambers' and Concise Oxford, have also now adopted synchronic principles of semantic description. The New Oxford dictionary of English (1998, 2003) uses both corpus evidence and citations collected by the Oxford Reading Program. Its lexical analysis reflects prototype theory, local grammar (valencies), and selectional preferences.