Innovation and Continuity in English Learners' Dictionaries: The Single-clause When-definition

Abstract

The recent innovative use of single-clause when-definitions for nouns entered in English learners’ dictionaries is shown to be paralleled in the seventeenth-century dictionary of Elisha Coles, a self-styled ‘Teacher of the Tongue to Forreigners’. It is uncertain whether the modern use of non-analytical word explanations for the benefit of learners derives from ‘folk-definition’, but in Coles the origin is clear. Most of the when-definitions in his compact octavo dictionary are truncated versions of more expansive and grammatically explicit entries taken from his main source-book, the dictionary of Edward Phillips, or from contemporary legal dictionaries and glossaries of nautical terms, dialect, etc. The Coles dictionary abounds in other unorthodox space-saving defining devices and the prime motive may therefore have been concision rather than a desire to help the learner by using ‘easy language’. Continuity of lexicographical tradition in the use of this definition pattern between Coles and the present day merits further investigation.