Acknowledgements
After eight years of working on his dictionary, Samuel Johnson famously complained that it had been ‘written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great’. This book is a lot shorter, and it didn’t quite take eight years to write, but the assistance and patronage I’ve received while working on it have been great – and so is my gratitude. I’m thankful to the scholars whose advice, knowledge, and encouragement helped me complete the book and the research that preceded it (whether or not they knew it at the time). At the forefront is Charlotte Brewer: mentor, collaborator, and friend. My thanks go also to Michael Adams, Helen Barr, Rebecca Anne Barr, Tamsin Blaxter, Deborah Cameron, David Cram, Edward Finegan, Peter Gilliver, Caroline Gonda, Jonathon Green, Nikolas Gunn, Lorna Hutson, Sidney Landau, William Leap, Nicholas Lo Vecchio, Roderick McConchie, Tommaso Milani, Lynda Mugglestone, Eva Nossem, Łukasz Pakuła, David Peterson, Namratha Rao, Chris Roulston, Laurie Shannon, Jesse Sheidlower, Il-Kweon Sir, Linda Stratmann, Božo Vukićević, and the collective wisdom of the Dictionary Society of North America. I’m also indebted to Helen Barton and Isabel Collins at Cambridge University Press, to Tanya Izzard for preparing a meticulous index, and to the librarians and archivists of the Bodleian, St Edmund Hall, and Trinity College in Oxford, Trinity College in Cambridge, the British Library, the West Yorkshire Archive Service, and McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa. Beverley McCulloch, the Archivist for the OED at Oxford University Press, must be singled out for her generosity and indefatigability. I’m grateful to the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press, Lord Gawain Douglas, the McFarlin Library, the British Library, and the West Yorkshire Archive Service for permission to reproduce the images in this book, and to Oxford University Press for permission to quote extracts from www.oed.com (© 2023 Oxford University Press; reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear). Finally, I must thank Gonville and Caius College for entrusting me with the research fellowship that supported this project; Candice Grieve, Josh Downe, Eleanor Xuhui Zhang, and my family, who have patiently learnt more about dictionaries than they ever cared to know; and Matt Lampitt, who saw it through to the end with me.
Earlier versions of three of this book’s chapters have been published elsewhere. Parts of Chapter 1 appeared as ‘Unlawful Entries: Buggery, Sodomy, and the Construction of Sexual Normativity in Early English Dictionaries’ in 2019 in Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, 40(1), 81–112, and are reproduced by permission of the DSNA. Parts of Chapter 3 appeared as ‘“Improper Words”: Silencing Same-sex Desire in Eighteenth-century General English Dictionaries’ in 2019 in Oxford Research in English, 8, 9–36. Parts of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘The Confessional Sciences: Scientific Lexicography and Sexology in the Oxford English Dictionary’ in 2020 in Language & History, 63(3), 214–32, and are reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis.
