12.2.3 Key developments in the construction of monolingual English dictionaries

The watershed for monolingual English lexicography was the turn of the eighteenth century, with the publication of dictionaries which embraced both everyday and less common words within the lexicon, thus a comprehensive listing of the general vocabulary of English. The first dictionary to do so was A New English Dictionary, published in 1702 by ‘JK’,6 with a large inventory of 28,000 words probably extracted from pre-existing spelling lists and bilingual dictionaries of Latin and French (Osselton 2011). However JK’s glossing was rudimentary, and only in the second edition (1713) was each word given a simple definition. Compare:

(1702) To Gaggle like a goose

(1713) To Gaggle, to cry like a goose

JK’s dictionary is far from discriminating alternative senses, or providing information on word grammar or etymology. Those now typical features of monolingual general lexicography are first seen in Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721). Amid its inventory of about 40,000 words (Starnes and Noyes 1946: 100), about and above appear among countless words drawn from specialized fields such as law, medicine and horsemanship. All are carefully defined, with alternative senses treated according to their grammatical roles, and given specific or generic etymologies, except for very common words. Bailey’s single-volume octavo publication significantly advanced the macro- and microstructure of the English monolingual dictionary. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) eclipsed all before it, by its sheer size (two folio volumes), and the enormous amount of scholarship brought to bear on documenting individual words and their senses from the canon of English literature. Its headword list consisted of the common English vocabulary, with a small proportion of cant, i.e. slang words, but not proper nouns. Individual entries were all given etymologies, whether they were foreign loans or constructed out of the common stock of English morphemes. Each word’s grammar was noted, in terms of its word class, and different senses were explained and enumerated, and often illustrated with citations from the English literary tradition, as in the following:

BARGE n.s. [from bargei Dut., from barga Low Latin]

1. A boat for pleasure

…the barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne

Burnt on the water Shakesp. Antony and Cleopatra

2. A boat for burden

Johnson’s dictionary was reprinted with little editorial change for seventy years (Reddick 1990: 171,175–6), and it set the benchmark for English lexicography well into the Victorian era. It appeared at an opportune moment to be the supreme lexical reference for the national language of Britain, sampling the ‘flower’ of the English literary tradition. Its citational material from Shakespeare onwards served to document thousands of words and senses which were notionally current in mid-eighteenth century England, yielding a more or less synchronic account of the lexicon. But its perspective seemed decadent to nineteenth century scholars: its microstructure deficient in the treatment of the history of word meanings – too much geared to making English a world language (Willinsky 1994: 16–17) – while its macrostructure lacked coverage of foreign loanwords encountered abroad (Ogilvie 2013: 61–8). At the same time the earlier history of English was opening up through research associated with the English Philological Society, which helped to mobilize the New English Dictionary project that became the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Like Johnson, it aimed to provide citations for the senses of all common words, but presented them as a chronology of the word’s growth and/or narrowing of usage over the centuries. It thus projects a longitudinal/diachronic view of the English lexicon, with both current and obsolete headwords listed. The OED noted etymologies for all words, as well as changes in their spelling over time, and modern pronunciations in an IPA-like script. While it documented changes in word usage through citations, the OED’s founding principle was to avoid making judgements about them as good or bad usage – letting the citations speak for themselves (Willinsky 1994: 17–18). This descriptive and inclusive stance was resolutely maintained by the chief editor (James Murray), despite some criticism of it (Ogilvie 2013: 54). The OED was unique among English dictionaries in its diachronic scope, its regular use of citations, and its sheer size (twelve volumes published successively from 1884 to 1928). It stands apart from the mainstream of modern English lexicography, which flows through the single-volume synchronic dictionary that provides pronunciations, orthographic and grammatical information, and definitions for all the enumerated senses of each word. Citations (invented or extracted from other sources) and summary etymologies may or may not be offered, depending on the size of the publication. Editorial advice on contentious usage may be added, apart from hidden judgements expressed through the exclusion of ‘unacceptable’ usages. Thus the details contained in the dictionary microstructure vary considerably, depending on the intended users and functions, as discussed in the following section. The makeup of the macrostructure varies also, in the numbers and types of headwords out of which it is constructed.