On the etymology of Anglicisms in Polish dictionaries

Abstract

In 2013 an article entitled English loanwords in Polish lexicons was published by the present author. It discussed the research involved in the compilation of the lexicon entitled Słownik zapożyczeń angielskich w polszczyźnie (A Dictionary of English Borrowings in the Polish Language) and at the same time highlighted a number of problematic areas in Polish dictionaries describing Anglicisms. The lexicon mentioned above was written at the request of Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Therefore the corpus was provided by the publishing house. In the event, the corpus (one Polish and two foreign dictionaries from 2003 and from 1995, 2003, respectively) contained many mistakes (etymological, semantic, graphic, etc.) which were corrected by the present author. The purpose of this paper, however, is to compare more recent dictionaries with the findings presented in the 2013 article. On the basis of a similar analysis of the 2014 lexicon we can observe a certain improvement in the description of the etymology of Anglicisms although we have to be aware of the fact that the corpus analyzed was smaller. The conclusion, therefore, is that while writing new Polish dictionaries, Polish lexicographers should consult philologists specializing in different languages.