Olga Timofeeva and Tanja Saily (eds.) Words in Dictionaries and History: Essays in honour of R.W. McConchie.

Abstract

Rod McConchie has contributed a great deal to historical lexicography and lexicology: he is particularly well-known for his work on Early Modern medical dictionaries and medical terminology, though his contributions are much more wide-ranging and include recent studies of the prefix dis- in English and work on the vocabulary of Jane Austen. This Festschrift begins with a preface by David Vancil on McConchie's life and works, a tabula gratulatoria, and an introduction by the editors. There is no bibliography of McConchie's works, although several of the individual articles contain references which will point the interested reader to some of his publications. The collection is divided into two sections: Part I contains seven articles on the history of dictionaries; Part II contains eight articles on word history and cultural history. Each part is roughly chronologically ordered: we move from sixteenth-century to twenty-first-century lexicography in Part I, while Part II begins with studies of Old English and proceeds to later periods. Each article contains an abstract, a list of keywords, and a bibliography. Because of the broad coverage of the volume, it is perhaps unsurprising that while some of the articles cite McConchie or indicate the ways in which he inspired or influenced them, others do not show any particular relationship to the celebrant of the Festschrift. Having said that, the collection is a tribute to the range of McConchie's interests, and also offers the reader a wide spectrum of current research on the history of dictionaries and the history of lexis.