Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective

Words and dictionaries from the British Isles in historical perspective brings together a wide range of current work on English-language lexicography and lexicology by a team of twelve contributors working in England, continental Europe, and North America. Fredric Dolezal s opening essay offers a provocative discussion of how the history of English lexicography has been, and might in the future be, written. The next four papers deal with the medieval and early modern periods: Carter Hailey investigates the dictionary evidence for individual lexical creativity in a discussion of Chaucer and the Middle English Dictionary; Gabriele Stein shows how early modern English dictionaries handled lexicological questions rather than simply listing words and equivalents; R. W. McConchie analyzes the biographical record of the lexicographer Richard Howlet, and Paola Tornaghi presents and discusses an unpublished source for the seventeenth-century lexicography of Old English. Three papers on the long eighteenth century follow: Noel Osselton s is an analysis of the alphabet fatigue which led many early lexicographers to treat words at the end of the alphabetical sequence more tersely than words at the beginning; Elisabetta Lonati s shows the engagement of John Harris s Lexicon technicum with one of the sources of its medical vocabulary; Charlotte Brewer s discusses the under-representation of eighteenth-century material in the Oxford English Dictionary. In the last three papers, Julie Coleman provides a groundbreaking analysis of Farmer and Henley s Slang and its analogues; Peter Gilliver draws on the Oxford English Dictionary archives to tell the story of an important editorial crisis; and Laura Pinnavaia discusses the syntactic flexibility of a set of idioms in a corpus of nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose. The volume as a whole offers new discoveries and important analytical and conceptual work, and is an essential text in the developing field of the history of lexicography.