Dictionaries and lexicography (the art and craft of dictionary-making) have existed as long as humans have been writing. When one considers that the first dictionaries were carved into clay tablets by Sumerians over 4,000 years ago, then the first monolingual English dictionary, which appeared in 1604, could be considered positively ‘recent’. However, the four centuries since then present a fascinating story of evolution, innovation, devotion, plagiarism, and controversy.
Dictionaries are the kinds of books that are always ‘just there’. Alongside religious texts they have acquired, throughout history, a sense of sacredness and authority. There are reasons for this, and this volume traces how this became so. How did a single genre of text have the power to standardise the English language across time and region, to rival the Bible in notions of authority, and to challenge our understanding of objectivity, prescription, and description?
The story of English dictionaries is neither neat nor tidy, and certainly cannot be told as a straight linear progression from wordlist to spelling book to multi-volume dictionary. Rather, it is better understood as the story of the development of a whole ecosystem in which dictionaries of varied sizes and types co-existed for decades, or in some cases over a century, in multiple print runs and editions. Hence, the linear chronology which appears at the front of this volume necessarily presents a more cohesive picture than the reality. This is not to say that there were not observable trends in the content and coverage of dictionaries throughout the centuries. Many dictionaries of the sixteenth century advertised the coverage of ‘hard words’; those of the eighteenth century were prescriptive in their approach and prided themselves on ‘completeness’; whereas dictionaries in the nineteenth century pioneered the descriptivist approaches which are now the norm amongst major English dictionaries.
Economics has played an important part in the history of English dictionaries: the large, conspicuous, and expensive texts were never as popular to readers as the smaller, cheaper texts. The story of the English dictionary since the early seventeenth century, as described by John Considine in this volume, has always primarily been a story of cheap, unpretentious, and fairly portable texts. This is perhaps not surprising to us in today’s world in which millions of people act similarly by choosing to access a free online or mobile dictionary of mediocre quality, rather than pay a subscription to a comprehensive, scholarly one.
This volume attempts to tell the story of this thriving ecosystem. An international team of twenty-seven leading scholars and lexicographers presents chapters that are divided into three sections: first, an overview of essential issues pertaining to dictionary style and content; secondly, a fresh narrative of the development of English dictionaries throughout the centuries right up to current-day applications of technology, corpus linguistics, natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence; and thirdly, essays on the regional and global nature of English lexicography and its power to help standardise varieties of English and to define nations seeking independence from the British Empire.
These essays engage critically with the dictionaries they document, contextualising them historically and asking theoretical and methodological questions relating to the role that dictionaries have played, or do play, as tools of standardisation, prestige, power, education, literacy, and national identity. Readers who may want to delve more deeply into specific topics covered in the volume are encouraged to take advantage of the comprehensive list of dictionaries and the guide to further reading at the back of the volume.
It is important to note that the title ‘English Dictionaries’ refers to monolingual English dictionaries as distinct from bilingual dictionaries. Hence, although the first three essays of the second section address influences on monolingual dictionaries from the (earlier) bilingual tradition, it is the former that is the focus of this volume. This reflects a general distinction within the field in which lexicographic policies and practices of both traditions are generally kept separate. In essence, it would not be possible to do justice to either tradition in a single volume on both.
It was not long after the printing press was invented that the first dictionaries included English, but they were not monolingual. The Promptorium parvulorum, the first English-to-Latin dictionary, was published in 1499. It was another century before the first book generally regarded as the first stand-alone, monolingual English dictionary was published, A Table Alphabeticall (1604) by Robert Cawdrey. Cawdrey made use of wordlists that had appeared earlier in educational texts such as Richard Mulcaster’s The First Part of the Elementarie (1582) and Edmund Coote’s The English Schoole-Maister (1596).
It is intended that this Cambridge Companion will serve as a guide both to those who are studying this subject for the first time and to those who are already engaged in the study of dictionaries, especially those who might use them as barometers of culture and ways of gauging the social and cultural practices and biases of a particular period or region.
