On Quotations
I have retained the original spelling, capitalization, emphases, and punctuation in quotations from all sources, with a few exceptions. Uses of long ſ in early modern texts have been replaced with s, and uses of square brackets [] in dictionaries have been replaced with braces {} to distinguish them from my editorial annotations. Although dictionaries vary in how they distinguish headwords from definitions, I have chiefly represented headwords in lowercase italics and definitions in roman. Quotations in languages other than English are followed by bracketed translations or transliterations. A special case is presented by the papers of Anne Lister, sections of which were written in code (see Figure 1.1). I have set deciphered quotations in italics.
On the Oxford English Dictionary
The OED is in the midst of being revised for its third edition, and at present the online dictionary (www.oed.com) consists of a mixture of new and updated content and as-yet unrevised entries. All of the OED Online entries cited in this book were last accessed on 16 March 2023, but some may have changed since then.
