The Unfinished Business of Eighteenth-Century European Lexicography

Abstract

Abstract This chapter reviews the development and publication of dictionaries in Europe in the eighteenth century, covering advances in continental lexicography that had significant influence on the dictionaries that evolved in the nineteenth century and beyond. Dictionaries of Germanic and Romance languages; Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; and other world languages all abounded at the time. The remarkable lexicographical activity of the eighteenth century is evidenced by the vigour, high quality, and proliferation of the more prominent and scholarly dictionaries of the period discussed. The developments which took place at this level had their effect at humbler levels too, Considine argues, as the makers of modest dictionaries abridged, or drew more or less explicitly from, the flagship dictionaries of national and classical languages. But all this activity still left a number of challenges to be addressed by nineteenth-century lexicographers. Considine divides these into three groups: questions of the structure and contents of the dictionary entry; questions of the scope of the dictionary wordlist; and larger questions about the sorts of information which dictionaries should offer. In covering these three types of challenges in the course of his chapter, Considine delves into crucial issues that affected the formation of the dictionary genre and that continue to be discussed in lexicography today.