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The evolution of English lexicography,

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THE ROMANES LECTURE 1900

THE EVOLUTION

OF

ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY

JAMES A. H. MURRAY

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.

PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW YORK

THE ROMANES LECTURE
1900

The Evolution

of

English Lexicography

JAMES A. H. MURRAY

M.A., LL.D., D.C.L., Ph.D.

DELIVERED

IN THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE, OXFORD,
JUNE 22, 1900

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

1900

5 ok £ -%

A- 14* s*jfe

PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

BY HORACE HART, M.A.

PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

THE EVOLUTION OF
ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY

When the 'Act to facilitate the provision of Allot-
ments for the Labouring Classes' was before the
House of Commons in 1887, a well-known member for
a northern constituency asked the Minister who had
charge of the measure for a definition of the term
allotment, which occurred so often in the Bill. The
Minister somewhat brusquely told his interrogator
to 'look in the Dictionary/ at which there was,
according to the newspapers, ' a laugh.' The member
warmly protested that, being called upon to consider
a measure dealing with things therein called 'Allot-
ments,' a term not known to English Law, nor
explained in the Bill itself, he had a right to ask
for a definition. But the only answer he received
was 'Johnson's Dictionary! Johnson's Dictionary!' at
which, according to the newspapers, the House gave
•another laugh,' and the interrogator subsided. The
real humour of the situation, which was unfortunately

6 The Romanes Lecture 1900

lost upon the House of Commons, was, that as agri-
cultural allotments had not been thought of in the
days of Dr. Johnson, no explanation of the term in
this use is to be found in Johnson's Dictionary; as,
however, this happened to be unknown, alike to the
questioner and to the House, the former missed
a chance of 'scoring' brilliantly, and the House the
chance of a third laugh, this time at the expense of
the Minister. But the replies of the latter are typical
of the notions of a large number of persons, who
habitually speak of 'the Dictionary,' just as they do
of ' the Bible,' or ' the Prayer-book,' or ' the Psalms ' ;
and who, if pressed as to the authorship of these works,
would certainly say that ' the Psalms ' were composed
by David, and 'the Dictionary' by Dr. Johnson.

I have met persons of intelligence who supposed
that if Dr. Johnson was not the sole author of 'the
Dictionary' — a notion which, in view of the 'push-
fulness' wherewith, in recent times, Dictionaries,
American and other, have been pressed upon public
notice, is now not so easily tenable — he was, at least,
the ' original author,' from whose capacious brain that
work first emanated. Whereas, in truth, Dr. Johnson
had been preceded by scores of workers, each of
whom had added his stone or stones to the lexico-
graphic cairn, which had already risen to goodly
proportions when Johnson made to it his own splendid
contribution.

For, the English Dictionary, like the English Con-
stitution, is the creation of no one man, and of no
one age ; it is a growth that has slowly developed itself

The Evolution of English Lexicography 7

adown the ages. Its beginnings lie far back in times
almost prehistoric. And these beginnings themselves,
although the English Dictionary of to-day is lineally
developed from them, Were neither Dictionaries, nor
even English. As to their language, they were in the
first place and principally Latin : as to their substance,
they consisted, in large part at least, of glosses. They
were Latin, because at the time to which we refer,
the seventh and eighth centuries of our era, Latin was
in Western Europe the on ly language of books, the
learning of Latin the portal to all learning. And they
were glosses in this wise: the possessor of a Latin
book, or the member of a religious community which
were the fortunate possessors of half-a-dozen books,
in his ordinary reading of this literature, here and
there came across a difficult word which lay outside
the familiar Latin vocabulary. When he had ascer-
tained the meaning of this, he often, as a help to his
own memory, and a friendly service to those who
might handle the book after him, wrote the meaning
over the word in the original text, in a smaller hand,
sometimes in easier Latin, sometimes, if he knew no
Latin equivalent, in a word of his own vernacular.
Such an explanatory word written over a word of the
text is a gloss. Nearly all the Latin MSS. of religious
or practical treatises, that have come down to us from
the Middle Ages, contain examples of such glosses,
sometimes few, sometimes many. It may naturally be
supposed that this glossing of MSS. began in Celtic
and Teutonic, rather than in Romanic lands. In the
latter, the old Latin was not yet so dead, nor the vulgar

8 The Romanes Lecture 1900

idioms that were growing out of it, as yet so distinct
from it, as to render the glossing of the one by the
other needful. The relation of Latin to, say, the
Romanic of Provence, was like that of literary English
to Lancashire or Somerset dialect; no one thinks
of glossing a literary English book by Somersetshire
word-forms ; for, if he can read at all, it is the literary
English that he does read. So if the monk of
Burgundy or Provence could read at all, it was the
Book-Latin that he could and did read. But, to the
Teuton or the Celt, Latin was an entirely foreign
tongue, the meaning of whose words he could not
guess by any likeness to his own; by him Latin had
been acquired by slow and painful labour, and to him
the gloss was an important aid. To the modern
philologist, Teutonic or Celtic, these glosses are very
precious; they have preserved for us a large number
of Old English, Old Irish, Old German words that
occur nowhere else, and which, but for the work of
the old glossators, would have been lost for ever.
No inconsiderable portion of the oldest English
vocabulary has been recovered entirely from these
interlinear glosses ; and we may anticipate important
additions to that vocabulary when Professor Napier
gives us the volume in which he has been gathering up
all the unpublished glosses that yet remain in MSS.

In process of time it occurred to some industrious
reader that it would be a useful exercise of his
industry, to collect out of all the manuscripts to which
he had access, all the glosses that they contained, and
combine them in a list. In this compact form they could

The Evolution of English Lexicography 9

be learned by heart, thus extending the vocabulary
at his command, and making him independent of the
interlinear glosses, and they could also be used in
the school-teaching of pupils and neophytes, so as
sensibly to enlarge their stock of Latin words and
phrases. A collection of glosses, thus copied out and
thrown together into a single list, constituted a Glos-
sarium or Glossary; it was the remote precursor
of the seventeenth-century 'Table Alphabetical,' or
' Expositor of Hard Words.'

Such was one of the fountain-heads of English
lexicography; the other is to be found in the fact that
in those distant days, as in our own, the learning of
Latin was the acquisition of a foreign tongue which
involved the learning of a grammar and of a vocabulary.
Both grammar and vocables were probably in the main
communicated by oral teaching, by the living voice of
the master, and were handed down by oral tradition
from generation to generation. The stock of vocables
was acquired by committing to memory classified lists
of words ; lists of names of parts of the body, lists of
the names of domestic animals, of wild beasts, of fishes,
of trees, of heavenly bodies, of geographical features,
of names of relationship and kindred, of ranks and
orders of men, of names of trades, of tools, of arms,
of articles of clothing, of church furniture, of diseases,
of virtues and vices, and so on. Such lists of vocables,
with their meaning in the vulgar tongue, were also at
times committed to paper or parchment leaves, and
a collection of these constituted a Vocabularium or
Vocabulary.

io The Romanes Lecture 1900

In their practical use the Vocabulary and the Glossary
fulfilled similar offices; and so they were often com-
bined ; the possessor of a Vocabulary enlarged it by the
addition of a Glossary, which he or some one before
him had copied out and collected from the glossed
manuscripts of his bibliotheca. He extended it by
copying into it vocabularies and glossaries borrowed
from other scholars; he lent his own collection to be
similarly copied by others. Several such collections
exist formed far back in Old English times, the com-
posite character of which, partly glossary, partly
vocabulary, reveals itself upon even a cursory exami-
nation.

As these manuscript lists came to be copied and
re-copied, it was seen that their usefulness would be
increased by putting the words and phrases into alpha-
betical order, whereby a particular word could be more
readily found than by looking for it in a promiscuous
list of some hundreds or thousands of words. The first
step was to bring together all the words having the
same first letter. The copyist instead of transcribing
the glossary right on as it stood, extracted first all
the words beginning with A; then he went through
it again picking out all the words beginning with B ;
then a third time for those with C, and so on with
D, E, and the rest, till he had transcribed the whole,
and his copy was no longer in the fortuitous disorder
of the original, but in what we call first-letter order.

A still later scribe making a copy of this vocabulary,
or possibly combining two or three lists already in
first-letter order, carried the alphabetical arrangement

The Evolution of English Lexicography n

one stage further ; instead of transcribing the A -words
as they stood, he went through them, picking out
first those that began with Aa-, then those in Ab-,
then those in Ac-, and so on, to Az. Then he did
the same with the 5-words, picking out first all in
Ba-, then Be-, Bi-, BI-, Bo-, Br-, Bu-, By-; and so
exhausting the 5-words. Thus, at length, in this
second recension, the Vocabulary stood, not yet com-
pletely alphabetical, but alphabetized as far as the
second letter of each word.

All these stages can actually be seen in four of the
most ancient glossaries of English origin that have
come down to us, known respectively, from the libraries
to which they now belong, as the Leiden, the Epinal,
the Erfurt, and the Corpus (the last at Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge). The Leiden Glossary represents
the earliest stage of such a work, being really, in the
main, a collection of smaller glossaries, or rather sets
of glosses, each set entered under the name of the
treatise from which it was extracted, the words in
each being left in the order in which they happened
to come in the treatise or work, without any further
arrangement, alphabetical or other. It appears also
to incorporate in a final section some small earlier
vocabularies or lists of names of animals and other
classes of things. In order to discover whether any
particular word occurs in this glossary, the whole work
from beginning to end must be looked through. The
first advance upon this is seen in the Epinal Glossary,
which uses part at least of the materials of the Leiden,
incorporating with them many others. This glossary

12 The Romanes Lecture 1900

has advanced to first-letter order : all the A-words
come together, followed by all the B-words, and so
on to Z, but there is no further arrangement under
the individual letters 1 - There are nearly fourteen
columns of words beginning with A, containing each
about forty entries ; the whole of these 550 entries
must be looked through to see if a given word occurs
in this glossary. The third stage is represented by
the Corpus Glossary, which contains the materials of
its predecessors, and a great deal more, and in which
the alphabetical arrangement has been carried as far
as the second letter of each word : thus the first
ninety-five words explained begin with Ab-, and the
next seventy-eight with Ac-, and so on, but the
alphabetization goes no further 2 ; the glossary is in
second-letter order. In at least one glossary of the
tenth century, contained in a MS. of the British
Museum (Harl. 3376), the alphabetical arrangement
has been carried as far as the third letter, beyond
which point it does not appear to have advanced.

The MS. of the Corpus Glossary dates to the early
part of the eighth century ; the Epinal and Erfurt—
although the MS. copies that have come down to

1 Thus the first six Latin words in A glossed are apodixen,
aminem, amites, arcontus, axungia ; the last six are arbusta, anser,
qffricus, atticus, auiaria, avena; mostly 'hard' Latin it will be
perceived. The Erfurt Glossary is, to a great extent, a duplicate
of the Epinal.

a Thus the first five Latin entries in ab- are abminiculum, abelena,
abiecit, absida, abies, and the last five aboleri, ab borea, abiles, aborsus,
absorduum. To find whether a wanted word in ab- occurs in this
glossary, it was necessary to look through more than two columns
containing ninety-five entries.

The Evolution of English Lexicography 13

us are not older, or not so old— must from their
nature go back as glossaries to a still earlier date,
and the Leiden to an earlier still; so that we carry
back these beginnings of lexicography in England
to a time somewhere between 600 and 700 a.d., and
probably to an age not long posterior to the introduction
of Christianity in the south of England at the end
of the sixth century. Many more vocabularies were
compiled between these early dates and the eleventh
century; and it is noteworthy that those ancient
glossaries and vocabularies not only became fuller and
more orderly as time advanced, but they also became
more English. For, as I have already mentioned,
the primary purpose of the glosses was to explain
difficult Latin words ; this was done at first, whenever
possible, by easier Latin words ; apparently, only
when none such were known, was the explanation
given in the vernacular, in Old English. In the
Epinal Glossary the English words are thus relatively
few. In the first page they number thirty out of 117,
and in some pages they do not amount to half that
number. In the Corpus Glossary they have become
proportionally more numerous; and in the glossaries
that follow, the Latin explanations are more and
more eliminated and replaced by English ones, until
the vocabularies of the tenth and eleventh centuries,
whether arranged alphabetically or under classified
headings, are truly Latin-English : every Latin word
given is explained by an English one; and we see
clearly that a new aim had gradually evolved itself;
the object was no longer to explain difficult Latin

14 The Romanes Lecture 1900

words, but to give the English equivalents of as
many words as possible, and thus practically to pro-
vide a Latin Dictionary for the use of Englishmen 1 .
Learning and literature, science and art, had attained
to fair proportions in England, and in the Old English
tongue, when their progress was arrested by the
Norman Conquest. The Norman Conquest brought to
England law and organization, and welded the country
into a political unity; but it overthrew Old English
learning and literary culture. In literary culture the
Normans were about as far behind the people whom
they conquered as the Romans were when they made
themselves masters of Greece ; and it was not till
some two generations after the Conquest, that learning
and literature regained in England somewhat of the
position which they had occupied two centuries earlier.
And this new literary culture was naturally confined to
the French dialect of the conquerors, which had become
the language of court and castle, of church and law, of
chivalry and the chase ; while the rich and cultured
tongue of Alfred and iElfric was left for generations
without literary employment, during which time it lost
nearly all its poetical, philosophical, scientific, and
artistic vocabulary, retaining only the words of common

1 An important collection of these early beginnings of lexi-
cography in England was made so long ago as 1857, by the late
distinguished antiquary Thomas Wright, and published as the
first volume of a Library of National Antiquities. A new edition
of this with sundry emendations and additions was prepared
and published in 1884 by Professor R. F. Wulcker of Leipzig, and
the collection is now generally referred to by scholars in German
fashion under the designation of Wright- Wulcker.

The Evolution of English Lexicography 15

life and everyday use 1 . And for more than 300 years
after the Conquest English lexicography stood still.
Between 1066 and 1400, Wright- Wtilcker shows only
two meagre vocabularies, occupying some twenty-four
columns of his volume. One of these, of the twelfth
century, is only an echo of the earlier literary age,
a copy of a pre-Conquest glossary, which some scribe
who could still read the classical tongue of the old
West Saxon Court, transliterated into the corrupted
forms of his own generation. The other is a short
vocabulary of the Latin and vernacular names of
plants, a species of class-vocabulary of which there
exist several of rather early date.

But when we reach the end of the fourteenth century,
English is once more in the ascendant. Robert of
Gloucester, Robert Mannyng of Brunne, Dan Michel
of Canterbury, and Richard Rolle of Hampole, William
Langland and John Wyclif, John Gower and Geoffrey
Chaucer, and many other authors of less known or
entirely unknown name, have written in the tongue
of the people ; English has been sanctioned for use
in the courts of law; and, as John of Trevisa tells
us, has, since the ' furste moreyn ' or Great Pestilence
of 1349 (which Mrs. Markham has taught nineteenth-

1 This is the primary reason why in Middle and Modern
English, unlike what is found in German and Dutch, the terms
of culture, art, science, and philosophy, are of French or, through
French, of Latin origin. The corresponding Old English terms
were forgotten during the age of illiteracy, and when, generations
later, the speaker of English came again to deal with such subjects,
he had to do like Layamon, when he knew no longer tungol-crceft,
and could refer to it only as ' the craft ihote astronomie in other
kunnes speche.'

1 6 The Romanes Lecture 1900

century historians to call the 'Black Death'), been
introduced into the grammar schools in the transla-
tion of Latin exercises, which boys formerly rendered
into French. And under these new conditions lexico-
graphical activity at once bursts forth with vigour.
Six important vocabularies of the fifteenth century are
printed by Wright- Wiilcker, most of them arranged,
like the Old English one of iElfric, under subject-
headings ; but one large one, extending to 2,500 words,
entirely alphabetical. About the middle of the century,
also, was compiled the famous Medulla Grammatices \
designated, with some propriety, ' the first Latin-
English Dictionary,' the popularity of which is shown
by the many manuscript copies that still survive;
while it formed the basis of the Ortus (i.e. Hortus)
Vocabulorum or first printed Latin-English Dictionary,
which issued from the press of Wynkyn de Worde
in 1500, and in many subsequent editions down to
1533, as well as in an edition by Pynson in 1509.

But all the glossaries and vocabularies as yet
mentioned were Latin-English ; their primary object
was not English, but the elucidation of Latin. A
momentous advance was made about 1440, when
Brother Galfridus Grammaticus — Geoffrey the Gram-
marian — a Dominican friar of Lynn Episcopi in
Norfolk, produced the English-Latin vocabulary, to
which he gave the name of Prtmptuarium or Promp-
torium Parvulorum, the Children's Store-room or
Repository.

The Promptorium, the name of which has now
1 Also Medulla GrammaKcae, or usually Grammatics.

The Evolution of English Lexicography 17

become a household word to students of the history
of English, is a vocabulary containing some 10,000
words — substantives, adjectives, and verbs— with their
Latin equivalents, which, as edited by Mr. Albert
Way for the Camden Society in 1865, makes a goodly
volume. Many manuscript copies of it were made and
circulated, of which six or seven are known to be still
in existence, and after the introduction of printing it
passed through many editions in the presses of Pynson,
Wynkyn de Worde, and Julian Notary.

Later in the same century, the year 1483 saw the
compilation of a similar, but quite independent work,
which its author named the Catholicon Anglicum,
that is, the English Catholicon or Universal treatise,
after the name of the celebrated Latin dictionary of
the Middle Ages, the Catholicon or Summa of Johannes
de Balbis, or John of Genoa, made in 1286. The
English Catholicon was in itself a work almost equally
valuable with the Promptorium ; but it appears never
to have attained to the currency of the Promptorium,
which appeared as a printed book in 1499, while
the Catholicon remained in two MSS. till printed for
the Early English Text Society in 1881.

The Renascence of Ancient Learning had now
reached England, and during the sixteenth century
there were compiled and published many important
Latin-English and English-Latin vocabularies and
dictionaries. Among these special mention must be
made of the Dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot, Knight,
the first work, so far as I know, which took to itself
in English what was destined to be the famous name

B

18 The Romanes Lecture igoo

of Dictionary, in mediaeval Latin, Dictionarius liber,
or Dictionarium, literally a repertory of dictiones, a
word originally meaning 'sayings,' but already by
the later Latin grammarians used in the sense of
verba or vocabula 'words.' The early vocabularies
and dictionaries had many names, often quaint and
striking ; thus one of c 1420 is entitled the Nominate,
or Name-book ; mention has already been made of the
Medulla Grammatices, or Marrow of Grammar, the
Ortus Vocabulorum, or Garden of Words, the Promp-
torium Parvulorum, and the Catholicon Anglicum ; later
we find the Manipulus Vocabulorum, or Handful of Voc-
ables, the Alvearie or Beehive, the Abecedarium, the
Bibliotheca, or Library, the Thesaurus, or Treasury of
Words — what Old English times would have called
the Word-hord, the World of Words, the Table Alpha-
betical, the English Expositor, the Ductor in Linguas,
or Guide to the Tongues, the Ghssographia, the New
World of Words, the Etymologkum, the Gazophylacium ;
and it would have been impossible to predict in the
year 1538, when Sir Thomas Elyot published his
' Dictionary,' that this name would supplant all the
others, and even take the place of the older and
better- descended word Vocabulary; much less that
Dictionary should become so much a name to conjure
with, as to be applied to works which are not word-
books at all, but reference-books on all manner of
subjects, as Chronology, Geography, Music, Com-
merce, Manufactures, Chemistry, or National Bio-
graphy, arranged in Alphabetical or ' Dictionary order.'
The very phrase, 'Dictionary order,' would in the

The Evolution of English Lexicography 19

first half of the sixteenth century have been unmean-
ing, for all dictionaries were not yet alphabetical.
There is indeed no other connexion between a dic-
tionary and alphabetical order, than that of a balance
of convenience. Experience has shown that though
an alphabetical order makes the matter of a dictionary
very disjointed, scattering the terminology of a par-
ticular art, science, or subject, all over the book, and
even when related words come together, often putting
the unimportant derivative in front of the important
primitive word, it is yet that by which a word or
heading can be found, with least trouble and exercise
of thought. But this experience has been only gradu-
ally acquired; even now the native dictionaries of
some Oriental languages are often not in alphabetical
order; in such a language as Chinese, indeed, there
is no alphabetical order in which to place the words,
and they follow each other in the dictionary in a
purely arbitrary and conventional fashion. In English,
as we have seen, many of the vocabularies from the
eleventh to the fifteenth century, were arranged under
class-headings according to subject ; and, although Sir
Thomas Elyot's Dictionary was actually in alphabetical
order, that of J. Withals, published in 1554, under the
title 'A short dictionarie for young beginners,' and
with the colophon 'Thus endeth this Dictionary very
useful for Children, compiled by J. Withals,' reverts
to the older arrangement of subject-classes, as Names
of things in the Aether or skie, the xii Signes, the
vii Planets, Tymes, Seasons, Other times in the yere,
the daies of the weeke, the Ayre, the viij windes, the

b 2

20 The Romanes Lecture 1900

iiii partes of the worlde, Byrdes, Bees, Flies, and
other, the Water, the Sea, Fishes, a Shippe with other
water vessels, the earth, Mettales, Serpents, woorms
and creepinge beastes, Foure-footed beastes, &C. 1

It is unnecessary in this lecture to recount even
the names of the Latin-English and English-Latin
dictionaries of the sixteenth century. It need only be
mentioned that there were six successive and succes-
sively enlarged editions of Sir Thomas Elyot; that
the last three of these were edited by Thomas Cooper,
' Schole-Maister of Maudlens in Oxford ' (the son of
an Oxford tradesman, and educated as a chorister in
Magdalen College School, who rose to be Dean of
Christ Church and Vice-Chancellor of the University,
and to hold successively the episcopal sees of Lincoln
and Winchester), and that Cooper, in 1565, published
his great Thesaurus Linguae Romance et Britannicce,
'opera et industria Thomse Cooperi Magdalenensis,'
founded upon the great French work of Robert
Stephens (Estienne), the learned French scholar and
printer. Of this work Martin Marprelate says in his
Epistle (Arber, p. 42), 'His Lordship of Winchester
is a great Clarke, for he hath translated his Dictionarie,
called Cooper's Dictionarie, verbatim out of Robert
Stephanus his Thesaurus, and ill-favoured too, they
say ! ' This was, however, the criticism of an adversary ;
Cooper had added to Stephens's work many accessions
from his editions of Sir Thomas Elyot, and other
sources; his Thesaurus was the basis of later Latin-

1 At the end is an alphabetical list of adjectives ; extending
from If. 79a, col. a, to 83a, foot.

The Evolution of English Lexicography 21

English dictionaries, and traces of it may still be dis-
covered in the Latin-English dictionaries of to-day.

O/f printed English-Latin works, after the Promp-
torium, one of the earliest was the Vulgaria of William
Horman, Headmaster and Provost of Eton, printed by
Pynson in 1519. This is a Dictionarium or liber dic-
tionarius in the older sense, for it consists of short
dictiones or sayings, maxims, and remarks, arranged
under subject-headings, such as De Pietate, De Impietate,
De corporis dotibus, De Valetudinis cura, De Hortensibus,
De Bellicis, and finally a heading Promiscua. It may
therefore be conceived that it is not easy to find
any particular didio. Horman was originally a Cam-
bridge man ; but, according to Wood, he was elected
a Fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1477, the
very year in which Caxton printed his first book
in England, and in this connexion it is interesting to
find among the illustrative sentences in the Vulgaria,
this reference to the new art (sign. Oij) : ' The prynters
haue founde a crafte to make bokes by brasen letters
sette in ordre by a frame,' which is thus latinized :
'Chalcographi artem excogitauerunt imprimendi libros
qua literse formis sereis excudunt.' Of later English-
Latin dictionaries two deserve passing mention: the
Abecedarium of Richard Huloet or Howlet, a native
of Wisbech, which appeared in the reign of Edward VI,
in 1552, and the Alvearie of John Baret, Fellow of
Trinity College, Cambridge, published under Elizabeth
in 1573. The Abecedarium, although it gives the
Latin equivalents, may be looked upon to some extent
as an English dictionary, for many of the words have

22 The Romanes Lecture 1900

an English explanation, as well as a Latin rendering ;

thus Almesse, or gift of dryncke, meate, or money,

distributed to the poore, sporta, sportula ; Amyable,

pleasante, or hauing a good grace, amabilis ; Ana-

baptistes, a sorte of heretyques of late tyme in Germanye

about the yere of our Lorde God .1524. . . . Anabaptistce.

Baret's Alvearie of 1573 has been justly styled ' one

of the most quaint and charming of all the early

Dictionaries.' In his 'Prefatory Address to the Reader'

the author tells, in fine Elizabethan prose, both how

his book came into existence, and why he gave it

its curious name : —

' About eighteene yeeres agone, hauing pupils at Cambridge
studious of the Latine tongue, I vsed them often to write Epistles
and Theames together, and dailie to translate some peece of
English into Latine, for the more speedie attaining of the same.
And after we had a little begun, perceiuing what great trouble
it was to come running to me for euerie worde they missed,
knowing then of no other Dictionarie to helpe vs, but Sir Thomas
Eliots Librarie, which was come out a little before ; I appointed
them certaine leaues of the same booke euerie daie to write the
english before the Latin, & likewise to gather a number of fine
phrases out of Cicero, Terence, Caesar, Liuie, &c. & to set them
vnder seuerall titles, for the more readie finding them againe at
their neede. Thus, within a yeere or two, they had gathered
together a great volume, which (for the apt similitude betweene
the good Scholers and diligent Bees in gathering their waxe and
honie into their Hiue) I called then their Aluearie, both for
a memoriall by whom it was made, and also by this name to
incourage other to the like diligence, for that they should not see
their worthie praise for the same, vnworthilie drowned in obliuion.
Not long after, diuers of our friends borrowing this our worke
which we had thus contriued & wrought onelie for our owne
priuate vse, often and many waies moued me to put it in print for
the common profet of others, and the publike propagation of the
Latine tongue.'

But when Baret at length resolved to comply with

The Evolution of English Lexicography 23

this suggestion, there were many difficulties to be
overcome, the expense of the work being not the
least : —

' And surelie, had not the right honourable Sir Thomas Smith
knight, principall Secretarie to the Queenes Maiestie, that noble
Theseus of learning, and comfortable Patrone to all Students, and
the right Worshipfull M. Nowell, Deane of Pawles, manie waies
encouraged me in this wearie worke (the charges were so great,
and the losse of my time so much grieued me) I had neuer bene
able alone to haue wrestled against so manie troubles, but long ere
this had cleane broken off our worke begun, and cast it by for
euer.'

Between the dates of the Abecedarium and the
Alvearie, Peter Levins, Fellow of Magdalen College,
Oxford, published, in 1570, the first essay at an
English Riming Dictionary, the Manipulus Vocabulorum,
or Handful of Vocables, an original copy of which is
in the Bodleian Library ; it was reprinted for the
Early English Text Society in 1867 by Mr. H. B.
Wheatley. The English words are arranged in order
of their terminations, and each is furnished with a
Latin equivalent.

Of all the works which we have yet considered,
Latin was an essential element: whether the object
was, as in the glossaries and vocabularies before the
fifteenth century, to explain the Latin words themselves,
or as in the Promptorium and Catholicon, the Abece-
darium and the Alvearie, and other works of the
sixteenth century, to render English words into Latin.
But a new stage of development was marked by the
appearance of dictionaries of English with another,
modern language. In 1521, the ' Introductory to write

24 The Romanes Lecture igoo

and to pronounce Frenche,' by Alexander Barclay,
author of the ' Ship of Fooles,' was issued from the
press of Robert Coplande ; and about 1527 Giles du
Guez or du Wes (anglicized Dewes), French teacher
to the Lady Mary, afterwards Queen Mary, published
his ' Introductorie for to lerne to rede, to pronounce
and to speke French trewly.' In addition to grammatical
rules and dialogues, it contains a select vocabulary
English and French. In 1514, Mary Tudor, younger
sister of Henry VIII, became the unwilling bride of
Louis XII of France. To initiate the princess in her
husband's tongue, John Palsgrave, a native of London
and graduate of Cambridge, who had subsequently
studied in Paris, was chosen as her tutor, and accom-
panied her to France. For her use Palsgrave prepared
his celebrated Esclarcissement de la Langue Francqyse,
which he subsequently revised and published in 1530,
after his return to England, where he was incorporated
M.A. at Oxford. The Esclarcissement is a famous
book, at once grammar and vocabulary, and may be
considered as the earliest dictionary of a modern
language, in French as well as in English. It was
reprinted in 1852 at the expense of the French
Government in the series of publications entitled
'Collection de documents inedits sur 1'histoire de
France, publies par les soins du Ministre de 1' In-
struction Publique, Deuxieme Serie — Histoire des
Lettres et des Sciences.' It is a trite saying that
' they do these things better in France ' ; but it is,
nevertheless, sometimes true. Amid all the changes
of government which France has seen in modern

The Evolution of English Lexicography 25

times, it has never been forgotten that the history
of the French language, and of French letters and
French science, is part of the history of France ; the
British government has not even now attained to
the standpoint of recognizing this : among the his-
torical documents published under the direction of
the authorities of the Record Office, there is no series
illustrating the history of the language, the literature,
or the science of England.

Next to French, the continental languages most
important to Englishmen in the sixteenth century,
were Italian and Spanish, of both of which, accord-
ingly, dictionaries were published before the end
of the century 1 . In 1599 Richard Percevall, Gent.,
published his dictionary in Spanish and English ; and
in the same year ' resolute John Florio ' (who in his
youth resided in Worcester Place, Oxford, and was
matriculated at Magdalen College in 1581) brought out
his Italian-English Dictionary, the World of Words,
which he re-published in a much enlarged form in
1611, with dedication to the Queen of James I, as
Queen Anna's New World of Words. This year,
also, Randall Cotgrave published his famous French-
English Dictionary, which afterwards passed through

1 It must however be mentioned that the second dictionary of
English and another modern tongue was appropriately ' A Dic-
tionary in Englyshe and Welshe, moche necessary to all suche
Welshemen aswil spedlye learne the englyshe tongue, thought vnto
the kynges maiestie very mete to be sette forth to the vse of his
graces subiectes in Wales, ... by Wyllyam Salesbury.' The
colophon is ' Imprynted at London in Foster Lane, by me John
Waley. 1547.'

26 The Romanes Lecture 1900

so many editions. In the absence as yet of any
merely English dictionary, the racy English vocabulary
of Florio and Cotgrave is of exceeding value, and
has been successfully employed in illustrating the
contemporary language of Shakspere, to whom Florio,
patronized as he was by the Earls of Southampton and
Pembroke, was probably personally known. Thus, the
same year which saw England provided with the version
of the Bible which was to be so intimately identified
with the language of the next three centuries, saw her
also furnished with adequate dictionaries of French,
Italian, and Spanish; and, in 1617, a still more am-
bitious work was accomplished by John Minsheu
in the production of a polyglot dictionary of English
with ten other languages, British or Welsh, Low
Dutch, High Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Portu-
guese, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which he entitled
''Hye/uaw els ras yk<&(r<ras, id est Ductor in Linguas, the
Guide into Tongues.'

But though in these works there is necessarily
contained much of the material of an English dic-
tionary, so that we can from them recover most of
the current vocabulary, no one appears before the
end of the sixteenth century to have felt that English-
men could want a dictionary to help them to the
knowledge and correct use of their own language.
That language was either an in-born faculty, or it
was inhaled with their native air, or imbibed with
their mothers' milk; how could they need a book
to teach them to speak their mother-tongue ? To
the scholars of the Renascence the notion would

The Evolution of English Lexicography 27

have seemed absurd — as absurd as it has seemed to
some of their descendants in the nineteenth century,
that an English grammar-school or an English uni-
versity should trouble itself about such aboriginal
products of the English skull, as English language
and literature. But by the end of the sixteenth
century, as by the end of the nineteenth, there was
a moving of the waters: the Renascence of ancient
learning had itself brought into English use thousands
of learned words, from Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic,
and other languages, 'ink-horn terms,' as they were
called by Bale and by Puttenham, unknown to, and
not to be imbibed from, mother or grandmother. A
work exhibiting the spelling, and explaining the
meaning, of these new-fangje ' hard words ' was the
felt want of the day ; and the first attempt to supply
it marks, on the whole, the most important point in
the evolution of the modern English Dictionary.

In 1604, Robert Gawdrey, who had been a school-
master at Okeham, and afterwards at Coventry, pub-
lished a modest octavo of 120 pages, 5J inches by 3I,
calling itself The Table Alphabetical of Hard Words,
in which he set forth the proper spelling and meaning
of some 3,000 of these learned terms; his work
reached a third edition in 1612 1 . In 1616, Dr. John
Bullokar, then resident in Chichester, followed with
a work of the same kind and size, named by him
An English Expositor, of which numerous editions

1 In the Dedication he says, 'Which worke, long ago for the
most part, was gathered by me, but lately augmented by my sonne
Thomas, who now is Schoolemaister in London.'

P

28 The Romanes Lecture 1900

came out, one as late as 1684. And in 1623 appeared
the work which first assumed the title of ' The
English Dictionarie,' by H. C, Gent. H. C, we learn
from the dedication, was Henry Cockeram, to whom
John Ford the dramatist addressed the following con-
gratulatory lines: —

To my industrious friend, the Author of this English Dictionarie,
Mr. Henry Cockram of Exeter.
Borne in the West ? liue there ? so far from Court ?
From Oxford, Cambridge, London? yet report
(Now in these daies of Eloquence) such change
Of words ? vnknown ? vntaught ? tis new and strange.
Let Gallants therefore skip no more from hence
To Italie, France, Spaine, and with expence
Waste time and faire estates, to learne new fashions
Of complementall phrases, soft temptations
To glorious beggary: Here let them hand
This Booke ; here studie, reade, and vnderstand :
Then shall they find varietie at Home,
As curious as at Paris, or at Rome.
For my part I confesse, hadst not thou writ,
I had not beene acquainted with more wit
Than our old English taught ; but now I can
Be proud to know I have a Countryman
Hath strugled for a fame, and what is more,
Gain'd it by paths of Art, vntrod before.
The benefit is generall ; the crowne
Of praise particular, and thats thine owne.
What should I say ? thine owne deserts inspire thee,
Twere base to enuie, I must then admire thee.

A friend and louer of thy paines,

Iohn Ford.
And a deeply interesting little book is this diminutive
ancestor of the modern English Dictionary, to describe
which adequately would take far more time than the
limits of this lecture afford. It is divided into three
parts : Part I contains the hard words with their

The Evolution of English Lexicography 29

explanation in ordinary language ; and instructive it is
to see what words were then considered hard and
unknown. Many of them certainly would be so still :
as, for example, abgregate, ' to lead out of the flock ' ;
acersecomick, 'one whose hair was never cut'; adcor-
porated, 'married'; adecastick, 'one that will do just
howsoever ' ; bubulcitate, ' to cry like a cow-boy ' ; collo-
cuplicate, ' to enrich ' — concerning which we wonder who
used them, or where Cockeram found them; but we
are surprised to find among these hard words abandon,
abhorre, abrupt, absurd, action, activitie, and actresse, ex-
plained as 'a woman doer,' for the stage actress had
not yet appeared. Blunder, ' to bestir oneself/ and
Garble, 'to dense things from dust/ remind us that
the meanings of words are subject to change. The
Second Part contains the ordinary words 'explained'
by their hard equivalents, and is intended to teach
a learned style. The plain man or gentlewoman may
write a letter in his or her natural language, and then
by turning up the simple words in the dictionary alter
them into their learned equivalents. Thus 'abound'
may be altered into exuperate, 'too great plenty' into
uberty, ' he and I are of one age ' into we are coetaneous,
'youthful babbling' into juvenile inaniloquence — a useful
expression to hurl at an opponent in the Oxford
Union.

The last part is the most entertaining of all : it is
headed 'The Third Part, treating of Gods and God-
desses, Men and Women, Boyes and Maides, Giants
and Diuels, Birds and Beasts, Monsters and Serpents,
Wells and Riuers, Herbes, Stones, Trees, Dogges,

30 The Romanes Lecture 1900

Fishes, and the like'; it is a key to the allusions
to classical, historical, mythological, and other mar-
vellous persons, animals, and things, to be met with
in polite literature. A good example of its contents
is the well-known article on the Crocodile: —

' Crocodile, a beast hatched of an egge, yet some of them grow to
a great bignesse, as 10. 20. or 30. foot in length : it hath cruell teeth
and scaly back, with very sharpe clawes on his feete : if it see
a man afraid of him, it will eagerly pursue him, but on the
contrary, if he be assaulted he wil shun him. Hauing eaten
the body of a man, it will weepe ouer the head, but in fine eate the
head also : thence came the Prouerb, he shed Crocodile teares,
viz., fayned teares.'

Appreciation of Cockeram's ' Dictionarie ' was marked
by the numerous editions through which it passed
down as late as 1659. Meanwhile Thomas Blount,
Barrister of the Inner Temple, and correspondent of
Anthony a Wood, was devoting the leisure hours
of twenty years to his ' Glossographia : or a Dictionary
interpreting all such hard words, whether Hebrew,
Greek, Latin,' etc., 'as are now used in our refined
English Tongue,' of which the first edition saw the
light in 1656.

I suppose it is a truism, that the higher position
now taken by English studies, is intimately interwoven
with the advances which have been made during the
last quarter of a century in the higher education of
women, and that but for the movement to let women
share in the advantages of a university education,
it is doubtful whether the nineteenth century would
have witnessed the establishment of a School of
English Language and Literature at Oxford. In con-

The Evolution of English Lexicography 31

nexion with this it is a noteworthy fact, that the
preparation of these early seventeenth century English
dictionaries was also largely due to a consideration
of the educational wants of women. The 'Table
Alphabeticall' of Robert Cawdrey, which was dedicated
to five 'right honourable, Worshipfull, vertuous, and
godlie Ladies 1 / the sisters of his former pupil, Sir
James Harrington, Knight, bears on its title-page that it
is 'gathered for the benefit and help of Ladies, Gentle-
women, or any other vnskilfull persons.' Bullokar's
Expositor was dedicated ' to the Right Honorable and
Vertvovs his Singvlar Good Ladie, the Ladie Jane
Viscountesse Mountague,' under whose patronage he
hoped to see the work 'perhaps gracefully admitted
among greatest Ladies and studious Gentlewomen,
to whose reading (I am made belieue) it will not prooue
altogether vngratefull.' In similar words, the title-
page of Cockeram's Dictionary proclaims its purpose
of ' Enabling as well Ladies and Gentlewomen ... as
also Strangers of any Nation to the vnderstanding
of the more difficult Authors already printed in our
Language, and the more speedy attaining of an elegant
perfection of the English tongue, both in reading,
speaking, and writing.' And Thomas Blount, setting
forth the purpose of his Glossographia, says, in words
of which one seems to have heard an echo in reference

1 'To the right honourable, worshipfull, vertuous, & godlie
Ladies, the Lady Hastings, the Lady Dudley, the Lady Mountague,
the Ladie Wingfield, and the Lady Leigh, his christian friends,
R. C. wisheth great prosperitie in this life, with increase of grace,
and peace from God our Father, through Iesus Christ our Lord
and onely Sauiour.' (A a.)

32 The Romanes Lecture igoo

to an English School in this University, ' It is chiefly
intended for the more-knowing Women, and less-
knowing Men ; or indeed for all such of the unlearned,
who can but finde in an Alphabet the word they vnder-
stand not.'

It is noticeable that all these references to the needs
of women disappear from the later editions, and are
wanting in later dictionaries after 1660; whether this
was owing to the fact that the less-knowing women
had now come upsides with the more-knowing men;
or that with the Restoration, female education went
out of fashion, and women sank back again into elegant
illiteracy, I leave to the historian to discover; I only,
as a lexicographer, record the fact that from the
Restoration the dictionaries are silent about the educa-
tion of women, till we pass the Revolution settlement
and reach the Age of Queen Anne, when J. K. in
1702 tells us that his dictionary is ' chiefly designed
for the benefit of young Scholars, Tradesmen, Arti-
ficers, and the female sex, who would learn to spell
truely.'

Blount's Glossographia went through many editions
down to 1707 ; but two years after its appearance,
Edward Phillips, the son of Milton's sister Anne, pub-
lished his New World of Words, which Blount with
some reason considered to be largely plagiarized from
his book. He held his peace, however, until Phillips
brought out a Law-Dictionary or Nomothetes, also largely
copied from his own Nomo-lexicon, when he could
refrain himself no longer, and burst upon the world
with his indignant pamphlet, 'A World of Errors

The Evolution of English Lexicography 33

discovered in the New World of Words, and in
Nomothetes or the Interpreter,' in which he exhibits
the proofs of Phillips's cribbing, and makes wild sport
of the cases in which his own errors and misprints
had either been copied or muddled by his plagiarist.
The latter did not vouchsafe a reply ; he knew a better
plan ; he quietly corrected in his next edition the
mistakes which Blount had so conveniently pointed
out, and his ' New World of Words,' furnished with
an engraved frontispiece, containing views of Oxford
and Cambridge, and portraits of some Oxford and
Cambridge scholars, lived on in successive editions
as long as Blount's.

Time and space forbid me even to recount the
later dictionaries of this class and period; we need
only mention that of Elisha Coles, a chorister and
subsequently matriculated student of Magdalen College
(of which his uncle, Elisha Coles, was steward under
the Commonwealth), a meritorious work which passed
through numerous editions down to 1732; and that
of Edward Cocker, the celebrated arithmetician and
writing-master of St. George's, Southwark, by whom
people still sometimes asseverate ' according to Cocker.'
This was published after his death, ' from the author's
correct copy,' by John Hawkins, in 1704, with a por-
trait of the redoubtable Cocker himself in flowing
wig and gown, and the following lines: —

' Cocker, who in fair writing did excell,
And in Arithmetic perform'd as well,
This necessary work took next in hand,
That Englishmen might English understand.' v

C

34 The Romanes Lecture 1900

The last edition of Phillips' New World of Words
was edited after his death, with numerous additions,
by John Kersey, son of John Kersey the mathema-
tician. Two years later Kersey threw the materials
into another form and published it in an octavo, as
Kersey's 'Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, or a General
English Dictionary,' of which three editions appeared
before 1721. In this work there are included a con-
siderable number of obsolete words, chiefly from
Spenser and his contemporaries, marked O., and in
some cases erroneously explained. Professor Skeat
has pointed out that this was the source of Chatter-
ton's Elizabethan vocabulary, and that he took the
obsolete words, which he attributed to Rowley,
erroneous explanations and all, direct from Kersey's
Dictionary.

More than 100 years had now elapsed since Robert
Cawdrey prepared his ' Table Alphabeticall,' and
nearly a century since the work of Cockeram ; and
all the dictionaries which had meanwhile appeared,
although their size had steadily increased, were, in
purpose and fact, only what these works had been —
Vocabularies of ' Hard Words,' not of words in
general. The notion that an English Dictionary ought
to contain all English words had apparently as yet
occurred to no one; at least no one had proposed
to carry the idea into practice. But this further step
in the evolution of the modern dictionary was now
about to be made, and the man who made it was
one of the most deserving in the annals of English
lexicography. We now, looking back on the eighteenth

The Evolution of English Lexicography 35

century, associate it chiefly with the work of Dr.
Johnson ; but down beyond the middle of that century,
and to the man in the street much later, by far the
best-known name in connexion with dictionaries was
that of Nathanael Bailey. An advertisement ap-
pended to the first edition of his Dictionary runs
thus : ' Youth Boarded, and taught the Hebrew,
Greek, and Latin languages, in a Method more Easy
and Expedient than is common; also, other School-
learning, by the Author of this Dictionary, to be
heard of at Mr. Batley's, Bookseller, at the Sign of
the Dove in Paternoster Row.' Bailey was the author
or editor of several scholarly works ; but, for us, his
great work was his Universal Etymological English
Dictionary, published in 1721. In this he aimed at
including all English words; yet not for the mere
boast of ' completeness,' but for a practical purpose.
The dictionary was not merely explanatory, it was
also etymological ; and though Englishmen might not
need to be told the meaning of man or woman, dog
or cat^, they might want a hint as to their derivation.
Bailey had hit the nail aright : successive editions
were called for almost every two years during the
century; when the author died, in 1742, the tenth
edition was in the press. In that of 1731, Bailey
first marked the stress-accent, a step in the direction
of indicating pronunciation. In 1730, moreover, he
brought out with the aid of some specialists, his folio

1 His explanations of such words were curt enough : ' Cat, a
Creature well known ' ; ' Horse, a Beast well known ' ; ' Man,
a Creature endued with Reason.'

C 2

36 The Romanes Lecture 1900

dictionary, the greatest lexicographical work yet under-
taken in English, into which he also introduced
diagrams and proverbs. This is an interesting book
historically, for, according to Sir John Hawkins, it
formed the working basis of Dr. Johnson 1 .

Bailey had many imitators and rivals, nearly all of
whom aimed, like him, at including all words ; of
these I need only name Dyche and Pardon 1735,
B. N. Defoe 1735, and Benjamin Martin 1749.

During the second quarter of the century, the feel-
ing arose among literary men, as well as among the
booksellers, that the time had come for the preparation
of a 'Standard Dictionary' of the English tongue.
The language had now attained a high degree of
literary perfection ; a perfect prose style, always a
characteristic of maturity, had been created ; a brilliant
galaxy of dramatists and essayists — Dryden, Pope,
Addison, Steele, Swift, Defoe — had demonstrated that
English was capable of expressing clearly and ele-
gantly everything that needed to be expressed in
language. The age of Queen Anne was compared
to the Ciceronian age of Latin, or the age of Aristotle
and Plato in Greek. But in both these cases, as
indeed in that of every known ancient people, the
language, after reaching its acme of perfection, had
begun to decay and become debased : the golden age
of Latinity had passed into a silvern, and that into
a brazen and an iron age. The fear was that a like
fate should overtake English also; to avert which

1 'An interleaved copy of Bailey's dictionary in folio he made the
repository of the several articles.' Works of J., 1787, 1. 175.

The Evolution of English Lexicography 37

calamity the only remedy appeared to be to fix the
language by means of a ' Standard Dictionary,' which
should register the proper sense and use of every
word and phrase, from which no polite writer hence-
forth would be expected to deviate; but, even as
generation after generation of boys and men found
their perfection of Latinity in the imitation of Cicero,
so all succeeding ages of Englishmen should find
their ideal of speech and writing fixed for ever in
this standard dictionary. To us of a later age,
with our fuller knowledge of the history of language, ~
and our wider experience of its fortunes, when it has
to be applied to entirely new fields of knowledge,
such as have been opened to us since the birth of
modern science, this notion seems childlike and pathetic.
But it was eminently characteristic of the eighteenth 1
century, an age of staid and decorous subsidence from
the energetic restlessness of the seventeenth — an age 1
in which men eschewed revolution and innovation, j
and devoted themselves assiduously to conserve, con-
solidate, polish, refine, and make the best of what 1
they had.

In this notion of ascertaining, purifying, refining, and
fixing the language, England was only following in /
the wake of some other countries. In Italy the
Accademia delta Crusca, and in France the Academie
frangaise, had been instituted for this very purpose,
and the latter had, after twenty years of preparation,
and forty more years of work, published the first edition
of a dictionary in which the French language was
(fondly and vainly) supposed to be thus ascertained,

38 The Romanes Lecture 1900

sifted, and fixed for ever. England had no Academy ;
but it was thought that what had been done in France
by the Forty Immortals might perhaps be done here
by some leading man of letters. The idea had, it
appears, been put before Alexander Pope, and approved
by him; he is said even to have drawn up a list of
the authors whose writings might be taken as authorities
for such a dictionary ; but he died in 1744, before
anything further was done. The subject seems then
to have been pressed upon the attention of Samuel
Johnson; but it was not till 1747 that the matter took
definite shape, when a syndicate of five or six London
booksellers contracted with Johnson to produce the
desired standard dictionary in the space of three
years for the sum of fifteen hundred guineas. Alas
for human calculations, and especially for those of dic-
tionary makers ! The work occupied nearly thrice the
specified time, and, ere it was finished, the stipulated
sum had been considerably overdrawn. At length,
in 1755, appeared the two massive folios, each 17 inches
long, 10 inches wide, and 3^ inches thick, entitled
'A I Dictionary | of the | English Language | in which |
the Words are deduced from their Originals, | and |
illustrated in their different significations | by Examples
from the Best Writers. | By Samuel Johnson.' The
limits of this lecture do not permit me to say one
tithe of what might and ought to be said of this great
work. For the present purpose it must suffice to
point out that the special new feature which it con-
tributed to the evolution of the modern dictionary was
the illustration of the use of each word by a selection of

The Evolution of English Lexicography 39

literary quotations, and the more delicate appreciation,
and discrimination of senses which this involved and ,/
rendered possible. Only where he had no quotations
did Johnson insert words from Bailey's folio, or other
source, with Did. as the authority. The literary
quotations were entirely supplied by himself from his
capacious memory, or from books specially perused
and marked by him for extraction. When he first
began his work in the room in Gough Square, his
whole time was devoted to thus reading and marking
books, from which six clerkly assistants copied the
marked quotations. The fact that many of the quota-
tions were inserted from memory without verification
(a practice facilitated by Johnson's plan of merely
naming the author, without specifying the particular
work quoted, or giving any reference whereby theV
passage could be turned up) is undoubtedly the reason
why many of the quotations are not verbally exact.
Even so, however, they are generally adequate for the
purpose for which they are adduced, that is, they usually
contain the word for which they are quoted, and the
context is more or less accurately rendered. But in some
cases it is otherwise : Johnson's memory played him
false, and he quotes a passage for a word that it does
not actually contain. As an example, under Distilment
he correctly quotes from Hamlet, 'And in the porches
of mine ears did pour the leperous distilment.' But
when he reached Instilment, his memory became vague,
and forgetting that he had already quoted the passage
under Distilment, he quoted it again as 'the leperous
instilment ' — a reading which does not exist in any text

40 The Romanes Lecture 1900'

of Shakspere, and was a mere temporary hallucination
of memory. There are some other curious mistakes,
which must, I suppose, have crept in either in the
course of transcription or of printing. As specimens
I mention two, because they have unfortunately per-
verted ordinary usage. The two words Coco and
Cocoa — the former a Portuguese word 1 , naming the
coco-nut, the fruit of a palm-tree; the latter a latinized
form of Cacao, the Aztec name of a Central American
shrub, whence we have cocoa and chocolate — were
always distinguished down to Johnson's time, and
were in fact distinguished by Johnson himself in
his own writings. His account of these in the
Dictionary is quoted from Miller's Gardener's Dic-
tionary and Hill's Materia Medica, in which the
former is spelt coco and the latter cacao and cocoa.
But in Johnson's Dictionary the two words are
by some accident run together under the heading
cocoa, with the disastrous result that modern vulgar
usage mixes the two up, spells the coco-nut, 'cocoa-'
as if it were co-co-a, and on the other hand pronounces
cocoa, the cacao-bean and the beverage, as if it were
coco. The word dispatch, from It. dispaccio, had been
in English use for some 250 years when Johnson's
Dictionary appeared, and had been correctly spelt by
everybody (that is by everybody but the illiterate) with
dis-. This was Johnson's own spelling both before
and after he published the dictionary, as may be seen

1 Pg. coco, a grinning mask, applied to the coco-nut because
of the three holes and central protuberance at its apex, suggesting
two eyes, a mouth, and nose.

The Evolution of English Lexicography 41

in his Letters edited by Dr. G. Birkbeck Hill 1 . It was
also the spelling of all the writers whom Johnson
quoted. But by some inexplicable error, the word got
into the dictionary as despatch, and this spelling was
even substituted in most of the quotations. I have not
found that a single writer followed this erroneous
spelling in the eighteenth century : Nelson, Wellesley,
Wellington, and all our commanders and diplomatists
wrote Dispatches; but since about 1820, the filtering
down of the influence of Johnson's Dictionary has
caused this erroneous spelling despatch to become
generally known and to be looked upon as authori-
tative; so that at the present time about half our
newspapers give the erroneous form, to which, more
lamentably, the Post Office, after long retaining the
correct official tradition, recently capitulated.

But despite small blemishes 2 , the dictionary was a
marvellous piece of work to accomplish in eight and
a half years; and it is quite certain that, if all the
quotations had had to be verified and furnished with

1 The following are examples of his own practice : The Rambler
(1751), No. 153, par. 3, * I was in my eighteenth year dispatched
to the university.' Ibid., No. 161, par. 4, ' I . . . soon dispatched
a bargain on the usual terms.' Letter to Mrs. Thrale, May 6, 1776,
' We dispatched our journey very peaceably.'

3 Among such must be reckoned the treatment of words in the
explanation of which Johnson showed political or personal animus
or whimsical humour, as in the well-known cases of whig, tory,
excise, pension, pensioner, oats, Grub-street, lexicographer (see Bos-
well's Johnson, ed. Birkbeck Hill, i. 294); although it must be
admitted that these have come to be among the famous spots
of the Dictionary, and have given gentle amusement to thousands,
to whom it has been a delight to see ' human nature ' too strong
for lexicographic decorum.

/

42 The Romanes Lecture 1900

exact references, a much longer time, or the employ-
ment of much more collaboration, would have been
required. With much antecedent preparation, with
( much skilled co-operation, and with strenuous effort,
it took more than nine years to produce the first
three letters of the alphabet of the Oxford New
English Dictionary.

Johnson's great work raised English lexicography
altogether to a higher level. In his hands it became
a department of literature. The value of the Dictionary
was recognized from the first by men of letters ; a
second edition was called for the same year./' But it
hardly became a popular work, or even a "work of
popular fame, before the present century. For forty
years after its first publication editions of Bailey fol-
lowed each other as rapidly as ever; numerous new
dictionaries of the size and character of Bailey, often
largely indebted to Johnson's definitions, appeared.
But the only new feature introduced into lexicography
between 1755 and the end of the century was the indi-
cation of the Orthoepy or Pronunciation. From Bailey
onward, and by Johnson himself, the place of the stress-
accent had been marked, but no attempt had been
made to show how such a group of letters, for
example, as colonel, or enough, or phthisical, was actually
pronounced; or, to use modern phraseology, to tell
what the living word itself was, as distinguished
from its written symbol. This feature, so obviously
important in a language of which the spelling had
ceased to be phonetic, was added by Dr. William
Kenrick in his ' New Dictionary' of 1773, a little later in

The Evolution of English Lexicography 43

1775 b y William Perry, in 1780 by Thomas Sheridan,
and especially in 1791 by John Walker, whose authority
long remained as supreme in the domain of pro-
nunciation as that of Dr. Johnson in definition and
illustration; so that popular dictionaries of the first
half of the present century commonly claimed to be
abridgements of 'Johnson's Dictionary with the Pro-
nunciation on the basis of Walker.'

From the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the
lexicographical supremacy of Johnson's Dictionary was
undisputed, and eminent students of the language
busied themselves in trying, not to supersede it, but
to supplement and perfect it. Numerous supplements,
containing additional words, senses, and quotations,
were published; in 1818 a new edition, embracing
many such accessions, was prepared by the learned
Archdeacon Todd, and ' Todd's Johnson ' continues
to be an esteemed work to our own day. But only
two independent contributions to the development of
lexicography were made in the earlier half of the
nineteenth century. These were the American work
of Noah Webster, and the English work of Dr. Charles
Richardson.

Webster was a great man, a born definer of words ;y
he was fired with the idea that America ought to
have a dictionary of its own form of English, inde-
pendent of British usage, and he produced a work
of great originality and value. Unfortunately, like
many other clever men, he had the notion that
derivations can be elaborated from one's own con-
sciousness as well as definitions, and he included in

44 The Romanes Lecture 1900

his work so-called ' etymologies ' of this sort. But
Etymology is simply Word-history, and Word-history,
like all other history, is a record of the facts which
did happen, not a fabric of conjectures as to what
may have happened. In the later editions of Webster,
these ' derivations ' have been cleared out en masse,
and the etymology placed in the hands of men abreast
of the science of the time; and the last edition of
Webster, the International, is perhaps the best of
one-volume dictionaries.

Richardson started on a new track altogether. Ob-
serving how much light was shed on the meaning
of words by Johnson's quotations, he was impressed
with the notion that, in a dictionary, definitions are
unnecessary, that quotations alone are sufficient ; and
he proceeded to carry this into effect by making
a dictionary without definitions or explanations of
meaning, or at least with the merest rudiments of
them, but illustrating each group of words by a large
series of quotations. In the collection of these he
displayed immense research. Going far beyond the
limits of Dr. Johnson, he quoted from authors back to
the year 1300, and probably for the first time made
Chaucer and Gower and Piers Ploughman living
names to many readers. And his special notion was
quite correct in theory. Quotations will tell the full
meaning of a word, if one has enough of them; but
it takes a great many to be enough, and it takes
a reader a long time to read and weigh all the
quotations, and to deduce from them the meanings
which might be put before him in a line or two.

The Evolution of English Lexicography 45

As a fact, while Richardson's notion was correct in
theory, mundane conditions of space and time rendered
it humanly impracticable. Nevertheless, the mass of
quotations, most of them with exact references, col-
lected by him, and printed under the word-groups
which they illustrated, was a service never to be
undervalued or forgotten, and his work, 'A New
Dictionary of the English Language . . . Illustrated
by Quotations from the best Authors' by Charles
Richardson, LL.D., 1836-7, still continues to be
a valuable repertory of illustrations.

Such was the position of English lexicography
in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the
late Dr. Trench, then Dean of Westminster, who
had already written several esteemed works on the
English language and the history of words, read
two papers before the Philological Society in London
' On some Deficiencies in existing English Dictionaries,'
in which, while speaking with much appreciation of
the labours of Dr. Johnson and his successors, he
declared that these labours yet fell far short of
giving us the ideal English Dictionary. Especially,
he pointed out that for the history of words and
families of words, and for the changes of form and
sense which words had historically passed through,
they gave hardly any help whatever. No one could
find out from all the dictionaries extant how long
any particular word had been in the language, which
of the many senses in which many words were used
was the original, or how or when these many senses
had been developed ; nor, in the case of words

46 The Romanes Lecture 1900

described as obsolete, were we told when they became
obsolete or by whom they were last used. He
pointed out also that the obsolete and the rarer
words of the language had never been completely
collected; that thousands of words current in the
literature of the past three centuries had escaped the
diligence of Johnson and all his supplemented ; that,
indeed, the collection of the requisite material for
a complete dictionary could not be compassed by
any one man, however long-lived and however diligent,
but must be the work of many collaborators who
would undertake systematically to read and to extract
I English literature. He called upon the Philological
\ Society, therefore, as the only body in England then
interesting itself in the language, to undertake the
collection of materials to complete the work already
done by Bailey, Johnson, Todd, Webster, Richardson,
and others, and to prepare a supplement to all the
1 dictionaries, which should register all omitted words
I and senses, and supply all the historical information
in which these works were lacking, and, above all,
should give quotations illustrating the first and last
appearance, and every notable point in the life-history
of every word.
t From this impulse arose the movement which,
widened and directed by much practical experience, has
culminated in the preparation of the Oxford English
Dictionary, 'A new English Dictionary on Historical
Principles, founded mainly on the materials collected
by the Philological Society.' This dictionary super-
adds to all the features that have been successively

The Evolution of English Lexicography 47

evolved by the long chain of workers, the historical
information which Dr. Trench desiderated. It seeks
not merely to record every word that has been
used in the language for the last 800 years, with its/
written form and signification, and the pronunciation
of the current words, but to furnish a biography of
each word, giving as nearly as possible the date of its
birth or first known appearance, and, in the case of
an obsolete word or sense, of its last appearance, the /
source from which it was actually derived, the form
and sense with which it entered the language or is
first found in it, and the successive changes of form 1
and developments of sense which it has since under- I
gone. All these particulars are derived from historical '
research; they are an induction of facts gathered by
the widest investigation of the written monuments of
the language. For the purposes of this historical/
illustration more than five millions of extracts have
been made, by two thousand volunteer Readers,
from innumerable books, representing the English
literature of all ages, and from numerous documen-
tary records. From these, and the further researches
for which they provide a starting-point, the history of
each word is deduced and exhibited.

Since the Philological Society's scheme was pro-
pounded, several large dictionaries have been compiled,
adopting one or more of Archbishop Trench's sug-
gestions, and thus showing some of the minor features
of this dictionary. They have collected some of the
rare and obsolete words and senses of the past three
centuries; they have attained to greater fullness and

48 The Romanes Lecture 1900

exactness in exhibiting the current uses of words,
and especially of the many modern words which the
progress of physical science has called into being.
But they leave the history of the words themselves
where it was when Dr. Trench pointed out the
deficiencies of existing dictionaries. And their literary
illustrations of the older words are, in too many cases,
those of Dr. Johnson, copied from r dictionary to dic-
tionary without examination or verification, and, what
is more important, without acknowledgement, so that
the reader has no warning that a given quotation is
merely second- or third-hand, and, therefore, to be
accepted with qualification 1 . The quotations in the
New English Dictionary, on the other hand, have been
supplied afresh by its army of volunteer Readers ; or,
when for any reason one is adopted from a preceding
dictionary without verification, the fact is stated, both
as an acknowledgement of others' work, and as a
warning to the reader that it is given on intermediate
authority.

Original work, patient induction of facts, minute
verification of evidence, are slow processes, and a work
so characterized cannot be put together with scissors
and paste, or run off with the speed of the copyist. All
the great dictionaries of the modern languages have
taken a long time to make ; but the speed with which

1 In some cases, long Lists of the Authors, from whose works
' the illustrative quotations have been selected,' are given, without
the statement that many of those quotations have not actually been
selected from the authors and works named, but have merely
-been annexed from Johnson or one of his supplemented.

The Evolution of English Lexicography 49

the New English Dictionary has now advanced nearly
to its half-way point can advantageously claim com-
parison with the progress of any other great dictionary,
even when this falls far behind in historical and
inductive character 1 . Be the speed what it may,
however, there is the consideration that the work
thus done is done once for all ; the structure now
reared will have to be added to, continued, and
extended with time, but it will remain, it is believed,
the great body of fact on which all future work will
be built. It is never possible to forecast the needs
and notions of those who shall come after us ; but with
our present knowledge it is not easy to conceive
what new feature can now be added to English
Lexicography. At any rate, it can be maintained that
in the Oxford Dictionary, permeated as it is through
and through with the scientific method of the century,
Lexicography has for the present reached its supreme
development.

1 The famous Deutsches Worterbuch of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm,
after many years of preparation, began to be printed in 1852 ;
Jacob Grimm himself died in 1863, in the middle of the letter F ;
the work is expected to reach the end of S by the close of the
century. The great Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal was
commenced in 1852 ; its first volume, A—Ajuin, was published
in 1882, and it is not yet quite half-finished. Of the new edition
of the Vocabolario della Crusca, which is to a certain extent on
historical principles, Vol. I, containing A, was published in 1863,
and Vol. VIII, completing I, in 1899 ; at least twenty-five more
years will be required to- reach Z. None of these works em-
braces so long a period of the language, or is so strictly historical
in method, as the New English Dictionary. Rather are they, like
Littre's great Dictionnaire de la Langue Frangaise, Dictionaries
of the modern language, with the current words more or less
historically treated.

D

50 The Romanes Lecture 1900

In the course of this lecture, it has been needful
to give so many details as to individual works, that
my audience may at times have failed ' to see the wood
for the trees,' and may have lost the clue of the lexico-
graphical evolution. Let me then in conclusion
recapitulate the stages which have been already in-
dicated. These are : the glossing of difficult words in
Latin manuscripts by easier Latin, and at length by
English words; Ihe collection of the English glosses
into Glossaries, and the elaboration of Latin- English
Vocabularies; xhe later formation of English -Latin
Vocabularies ; °the production of Dictionaries of
English and another modern language; the compila-
tion of Glossaries and Dictionaries of 'hard' English
words ; me extension of these by Bailey, for etymo-
logical purposes, to include words in general ; 1 the
idea of a Standard Dictionary, and its realization by
Dr. Johnson with illustrative quotations; the notion
that a Dictionary should also show the pronunciation
of the living word; \he extension of the function of
quotations by Richardson ; the idea that the Dictionary
should be a biography of every word, and should set
forth every fact connected with its origin, history, and
use, on a strictly historical method. These stages
coincide necessarily with stages of our national and
literary historyjjthe first two were already reached
before the Norman Conquest ; the third followed upon
the recognition of English as the official language of
the nation, and its employment by illustrious Middle
English writers. The Dictionaries of the modern
languages were necessitated first by the fact that

The Evolution of English Lexicography 51

French had at length ceased to be the living tongue
of any class of Englishmen, and secondly by the other
fact that the rise of the modern languages and increas-
ing intercourse with the Continent made Latin no longer
sufficient as a common medium of international com-
munication. The consequences of the Renascence
and of the New Learning of the sixteenth century
appear in the need for the Dictionaries of Hard Words
at the beginning of the seventeenth ; the literary polish
of the age of Anne begat the yearning for a standard
dictionary, and inspired the work of Johnson; the
scientific and historical spirit of the nineteenth century
has at once called for and rendered possible the
Oxford English Dictionary. Thus the evolution of
English Lexicography has followed with no faltering
steps the evolution of English History and the de-
velopment of English Literature.

*

SHE

v.'V