The Canon of the English Dictionary

Abstract

When Starnes and Noyes wrote their study of the early history of the English dictionary, they placed The Alphabetical Dictionary (1668) of Wilkins and Lloyd in the footnotes; they claimed that the dictionary did not belong in the history because it was embedded in a universal language project. I have previously argued that the dictionary should not be judged by the putative intentions of the authors, but should be judged by its content: that it has its own title page within the larger text, that it is called a dictionary and that it is constructed on linguistic and lexicographical principles. I have also argued that the dictionary stands in a tradition: discrete portions of the text can be found in a chain of transmission; that is, definitions found first in Wilkins and Lloyd can be traced through subsequent dictionary databases. There are some intriguing questions that follow from my assertions: what constitutes the dictionariness of a database? how do we decide the issue of textual transmission (using methods of scholarship? creating an approach unique to dictionaries?)? should we view English dictionaries as The Dictionary of the English Language, edited and revised through time, or as separate author-ized dictionaries of English? My paper will address these questions by attempting to provide an approach founded upon historical, linguistic and methodologies. I will also look at the ideological need, such as it presents itself, to erase Wilkins and Lloyd from the history of English lexicography. Thus, the sociology of scholarship will be an underlying theme in this paper.