12.2.2 Origins of the English dictionary as a pedagogical tool

The earliest recorded use of the word dictionary (dictionarius) in England (c.1225) is associated with the teaching of Latin in medieval schools. At that stage it referred to a list of Latin words, and only centuries later did it become the regular name for the familiar monolingual or bilingual dictionary. Even in the mid-sixteenth century, an English–Latin teaching manual titled A Shorte Dictionarie for Yong Begynners (John Withals 1553) presents words and their explanations in topical chapters like lesson plans, rather than alphabetically. The fi rst monolingual alphabetical glossaries of English were published in the late sixteenth century as supplements to Tudor teaching manuals, such as those of Robert Mulcaster in The Elementarie (1582), and Edmund Coote in The English Scholemaister (1596). Each of them extended his predecessor’s inventory with additional ‘hard’ words borrowed into English from Latin, Greek and Hebrew through Renaissance scholarship. Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall (1604) updated that of Coote (Stein 2010) to comprise around 2,500 words. It is generally recognized as the first English dictionary, despite its title and large amounts of legacy content (Landau 2001), no doubt because it was published as an independent reference work. Cawdrey is the first to explicitly envisage use of the dictionary outside the schoolroom, suggesting in his subtitle that the book would benefi t ‘ladies, gentilewomen or any other unskilfull persons’. Cawdrey’s work exemplifies aspects of later lexicographical practice, though not consistently implemented. His alphabetization of headwords is sometimes slightly erratic; plural headwords e.g. affaires, records, are mixed in with the standard singular forms, and inflected forms of verbs used as adjectives, thus not fully lemmatized to the base forms (Stein 2010). The source language for borrowed words is indicated by means of an abbreviation, e.g. [g] or [gr] for Greek, and the paragraph sign for French. Cawdrey’s wordlist is fully glossed, but the explanations are a mix of synonyms used like the translation equivalents of earlier bilingual dictionaries, and definitional paraphrases. Some definitions are simply generic, as when artichock is glossed as a type of ‘herbe’, and beagle as a type of ‘hound’. Alternative meanings are run on within the line of paraphrase, separated by commas, or by or, without marking distinct grammatical roles:

aduocate, a spokesman, atturney, or man of law, plead

Occasionally the grammar of the definition is at odds with that of the headword itself, as in

docilitie, easie to be taught

Grammar is clearly an underdeveloped aspect of the Table Alphabeticall. Yet the language of Cawdrey’s definitions is usually clear, and not resolutely impersonal as in later dictionary practice. An authorial I/we appears in defining meanings in space and time (Stein 2010), as in:

hemisphere, halfe of the compasse of heauen, that we see

moderne, of our time

Later, extended editions of Cawdrey’s wordlist in 1609, 1613 and 1617 are testimony to its popularity. The ‘hard words’ tradition in monolingual English lexicography grew steadily with seventeenth century dictionaries that contained countless foreign loanwords annexed into English through its expanding functions as the national language (Peters 2012). Many certainly belonged to literary style and formal registers of usage rather than the speechbased styles advocated by the Royal Society (Gordon 1966: 126–8). Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1656) included about 9,000 borrowed words (with discursive and sometimes far-fetched etymologies), and volumes of technical terms from the arts and sciences, with explanatory information. Other dictionaries in the ‘hard words’ tradition soon followed: Edmund Phillips’s New World of English Words (1658) with 11,000 words, and Elisha Coles’s An English Dictionary (1676), whose headword list expanded to 25,000 with the addition of dialect words, and underworld slang – which he suggests ‘may perchance save your throat from being cut, or… your pocket from being pickt’ (Starnes and Noyes 1946: 63). To make room for these extra words, Coles compressed his definitions and most are just synonyms. Despite their expanding inventories, seventeenth century ‘hard words’ dictionaries do not show advances in English lexicographic practice.5 In the same period, the frontiers of monolingual lexicography were being advanced within European academies, notably the Italian Accademia della Crusca and the Académie Française, as a means of establishing the status and scope of the national ‘vernacular’ (Tucker 1961: 58, 90). The lack of such an academy in England meant there was no concerted effort to codify the common English language, and English lexicography was still limited by its origins in bilingual dictionaries and compendiums of specialized vocabulary.