Wynkyn de Worde, heir to Caxton’s press, published in 1513 a little textbook entitled The flores of Ouide de arte amandi with theyr englysshe afore them: and two alphabete tablys (STC 18934). It has two substantial lexical tables, English-Latin, and Latin-English, that enable students to translate select Ovidian sentences from either language into the other. Ovid’s poem on the craft of making love to women is at face value a peculiar set text for early Tudor grammar-school boys. What were the auspices for The flores, and who is its putative author, a man named Walter?
This paper discusses the lexicographical contributions of John Halle (1529–1568), a surgeon and a Protestant poet from Maidstone, Kent. Halle was a member of progressive group of elite surgeons intent on improving the profession’s prestige by educating its members and by producing vernacular translations of surgical books. Halle’s major contribution was his translation of Lanfranc of Milan’s Chirurgia parva, an important medieval surgical manual. Entitled A most excellent and learned vvoorke of chirurgerie, called Chirurgia parua Lanfranci (1565), Halle’s translation garnered high praise, prompting the physician William Cuningham to suggest that Halle’s contributions in clarifying Lanfranc’s text were such that the book be called “Halles Lanfranke.” The glossary or “expositive table” compiled by Halle is an important early example of medical lexicography.
In the liminary materials to an anonymously published narrative poem, The First Booke of the Preservation of King Henry the vij (1599–1600), the author announced a dictionary project, promising – four years before the publication of Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall – that he would “set forth a Verball, or littel Dictionarie, with a Prosodia requisite for Poetry.” After a brief account of the context in which this promise was made, I will discuss the author’s identity, which can be narrowed down with some certainty, and established with a high degree of probability, from internal evidence, the likeliest candidate being one John Lane, a member of a well-connected Staffordshire gentry family. I will also discuss the likely form of the dictionary which Lane planned, and suggest why he never completed it.
Dictionary entries comprise two essential parts, the headword (‘lemma’) and the author’s explanation (‘gloss’). This paper addresses the ways in which compilers link these two components (using formulations such as ‘X means Y,’ ‘X is a mammal of the genus Z’). After a survey of medieval practice, the readers’ attention is drawn to the influential and ground-breaking bilingual (Latin–English) dictionary by Sir Thomas Elyot and the various ways in which he relates headword to gloss.
Johnson’s Dictionary bears a complicated relation to literary language. A large proportion of the illustrative quotations that Johnson used came from poetry. However, comments in the Preface, and elsewhere show that he had ambivalent feelings towards poetic language. When reading the Dictionary against a Concordance of Johnson’s own poems and plays, mediated by his explanations of what types of words were omitted in the Preface, it becomes clear that Johnson did not include in the Dictionary several words that he himself had used in his own poetry and plays. I list these words, with a short explanation of why words from Johnson’s active vocabulary might not have made it into the Dictionary.
When we encounter an unfamiliar quotation, we typically ask where it comes from. However, identification of the source may only be a starting point, from which we can trace the quotation’s later life within the language. This paper will take the phrase chaos and old night, originally from Milton’s Paradise Lost, and trace the main branches of its life within the English language, a path which ultimately links Milton with a twenty-first century journalist. In the course of this exploration, the paper will also consider how the quotation in question is likely to have been handled by dictionaries of quotations.
This paper presents a range of online dictionaries of English slang, and considers their search facilities, coverage and reliability, as well as practical factors involved in setting up and maintaining these resources. A selection of slang terms from Britain and the United States is used to explore gaps and trends in the dictionaries’ contents. The paper concludes by arguing that the best user-edited dictionaries have high editorial aspirations, and that even the worst can make a useful contribution to our knowledge of contemporary slang, which changes so quickly that a paper dictionary cannot possibly keep pace. Urban Dictionary undoubtedly has the most extensive coverage, but other sites challenge it in a number of respects.
Christfrid Ganander’s (1741–1790) Nytt Finskt Lexicon is the first etymological Finnish dictionary. Due to unfavourable circumstances, it was not published in the author’s lifetime but it did survive in manuscript form. The dictionary, which has more than 30,000 headwords, contains close on 50 Old English lexemes given as etymological counterparts of Finnish words in 45 entries. The present article has two main aims: first, to show in the light of our present knowledge to what extent the Old English etymologies are valid or erroneous, and secondly, to try to trace the sources Ganander utilized for his etymological discussions. It turns out that almost one half of Ganander’s Old English etymologies are mistaken. It would be wrong, however, to pass a severe judgment on Ganander as a lexicographer. Seen against the background of similar efforts in his own time, Ganander’s lexicographical achievement is valuable even in the area of etymology.
Numerous attempts to discover the origin of yeoman failed to produce definitive results. The element -man poses no difficulties. The problem is yeo-, a relic of some prefix or of an independent word. Among the putative etymons of yeoman two have enjoyed special popularity: *gāman ‘villager’ and yongman ‘young man.’ Neither is fully convincing. The OED cites yeomath ‘a second crop of grass’ and traces yeo- in it and in yeoman to a form of young. However, yeomath has analogues in German and Dutch, where its first element has been explained as meaning ‘additional.’ Consequently, yeoman must have been ‘an additional man/servant.’ Yet some problems pertaining to the circumstances in which the word was coined and to its phonetics remain.
The records of the British East India Company are an uncharted source for historical linguistics and lexicography. In particular, letters between Company employees stationed in the East Indies contain a large amount of colloquial language use. Among the more or less standardized reporting on business matters, there are discussions of all aspects of private life, such as food, drink and, occasionally, sex. This paper investigates a hapax legomenon in the correspondence of early East India Company merchants in Japan (1613–1623): the use of lapidable to mean ‘mature for sexual intercourse.’ The word is traced in Early and Late Modern English dictionaries and primary texts, and the paper ends with a discussion of East India Company merchants and creative language use.
This paper deals with one of the rival French suffixes which now form abstract nouns from verbs in English, as in recite/recital. Such formatives are often seen as semantically interchangeable, forming nouns with the core meaning ‘action/fact of V-ing.’ However, it can be argued that from their earliest appearance in English these suffixes began to select characteristically from a nexus of common meanings, both in the kinds of bases to which each suffix was attached, and in the kinds of contexts in which the formations tended to appear. This paper will suggest that deverbal derivatives in -al with action senses did not appear substantially until the seventeenth century, when a specialised meaning of ‘completed action’ possibly began to be favoured.
Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica contains unnoticed evidence for the processes of transition from Roman to Anglo-Saxon toponymy in early Anglo-Saxon England. Bede uses two different formulas to specify that place-names are English: a gente Anglorum appellatur (‘called by the people of the English’) and lingua Anglorum (‘in the language of the English’). The first phrase is used exclusively of places whose English names show phonetic continuity with Roman ones; the second with a more heterogeneous group which mostly does not show phonetic continuity. This demands explanation. The explanation suggested here is that major places (likely to be spoken of throughout a whole gens) enjoyed greater stability of nomenclature than minor ones.
This article deals mainly with the English Catalogue of Honor (1610) and the Latin Nobilitas Politica vel Civilis (1608), both by Thomas Milles, and the Anglo-Saxon Geþyncðo text that appears in these works. The article focuses on the rise of the 16th-century interest in Anglo-Saxon culture and language, on Lambarde as the editor and translator of early English law texts, the complexity of editorial processes in Early Modern England, the detective work required for establishing the relationship between different versions of one and the same text passage, as well as on the socio-historical background that explains the Latin and English terms for the ranks of nobility in early England (e.g., L comes, colonus; OE eorl, ceorl). The paper also claims that Thomas Milles can be added to the list of translators of Anglo-Saxon laws into Latin.
The paper traces the growth of the lexical field of ‘Contempt’ as represented by the computer-readable file ‘Contempt.txt’ which, together with ‘Disrepute.txt,’ formed the basis for Section ‘02.01.18 Contempt’ of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (2 vols.) published in 2009. Contempt.txt was received in October 2001 from the Thesaurus team. The author put it in tabular form and wrote a computer program to count the number of words attested for any chosen year and any field or sub-field distinguished by the HTE. Though in many ways superseded by the print version, Contempt.txt is still indispensable for the purposes of this paper.
Fencing schools proliferated on the continent during the sixteenth century. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, the rapier arrived in Britain from Italy and Spain, bringing with it an entirely new fencing style. The Italian style was most prominent throughout the age of the rapier, gradually ceding dominance to the French style of small sword play in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and each new style introduced new vocabulary into English and Scots. This lexis is currently being re-examined as part of the revision programme for the Third Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED3) and this paper considers how modern specialist knowledge of historical fencing may inform the editorial process.
Wynkyn de Worde, heir to Caxton’s press, published in 1513 a little textbook entitled The flores of Ouide de arte amandi with theyr englysshe afore them: and two alphabete tablys (STC 18934). It has two substantial lexical tables, English-Latin, and Latin-English, that enable students to translate select Ovidian sentences from either language into the other. Ovid’s poem on the craft of making love to women is at face value a peculiar set text for early Tudor grammar-school boys. What were the auspices for The flores, and who is its putative author, a man named Walter?
This paper discusses the lexicographical contributions of John Halle (1529–1568), a surgeon and a Protestant poet from Maidstone, Kent. Halle was a member of progressive group of elite surgeons intent on improving the profession’s prestige by educating its members and by producing vernacular translations of surgical books. Halle’s major contribution was his translation of Lanfranc of Milan’s Chirurgia parva, an important medieval surgical manual. Entitled A most excellent and learned vvoorke of chirurgerie, called Chirurgia parua Lanfranci (1565), Halle’s translation garnered high praise, prompting the physician William Cuningham to suggest that Halle’s contributions in clarifying Lanfranc’s text were such that the book be called “Halles Lanfranke.” The glossary or “expositive table” compiled by Halle is an important early example of medical lexicography.
In the liminary materials to an anonymously published narrative poem, The First Booke of the Preservation of King Henry the vij (1599–1600), the author announced a dictionary project, promising – four years before the publication of Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall – that he would “set forth a Verball, or littel Dictionarie, with a Prosodia requisite for Poetry.” After a brief account of the context in which this promise was made, I will discuss the author’s identity, which can be narrowed down with some certainty, and established with a high degree of probability, from internal evidence, the likeliest candidate being one John Lane, a member of a well-connected Staffordshire gentry family. I will also discuss the likely form of the dictionary which Lane planned, and suggest why he never completed it.
Dictionary entries comprise two essential parts, the headword (‘lemma’) and the author’s explanation (‘gloss’). This paper addresses the ways in which compilers link these two components (using formulations such as ‘X means Y,’ ‘X is a mammal of the genus Z’). After a survey of medieval practice, the readers’ attention is drawn to the influential and ground-breaking bilingual (Latin–English) dictionary by Sir Thomas Elyot and the various ways in which he relates headword to gloss.
Johnson’s Dictionary bears a complicated relation to literary language. A large proportion of the illustrative quotations that Johnson used came from poetry. However, comments in the Preface, and elsewhere show that he had ambivalent feelings towards poetic language. When reading the Dictionary against a Concordance of Johnson’s own poems and plays, mediated by his explanations of what types of words were omitted in the Preface, it becomes clear that Johnson did not include in the Dictionary several words that he himself had used in his own poetry and plays. I list these words, with a short explanation of why words from Johnson’s active vocabulary might not have made it into the Dictionary.
When we encounter an unfamiliar quotation, we typically ask where it comes from. However, identification of the source may only be a starting point, from which we can trace the quotation’s later life within the language. This paper will take the phrase chaos and old night, originally from Milton’s Paradise Lost, and trace the main branches of its life within the English language, a path which ultimately links Milton with a twenty-first century journalist. In the course of this exploration, the paper will also consider how the quotation in question is likely to have been handled by dictionaries of quotations.
This paper presents a range of online dictionaries of English slang, and considers their search facilities, coverage and reliability, as well as practical factors involved in setting up and maintaining these resources. A selection of slang terms from Britain and the United States is used to explore gaps and trends in the dictionaries’ contents. The paper concludes by arguing that the best user-edited dictionaries have high editorial aspirations, and that even the worst can make a useful contribution to our knowledge of contemporary slang, which changes so quickly that a paper dictionary cannot possibly keep pace. Urban Dictionary undoubtedly has the most extensive coverage, but other sites challenge it in a number of respects.
Christfrid Ganander’s (1741–1790) Nytt Finskt Lexicon is the first etymological Finnish dictionary. Due to unfavourable circumstances, it was not published in the author’s lifetime but it did survive in manuscript form. The dictionary, which has more than 30,000 headwords, contains close on 50 Old English lexemes given as etymological counterparts of Finnish words in 45 entries. The present article has two main aims: first, to show in the light of our present knowledge to what extent the Old English etymologies are valid or erroneous, and secondly, to try to trace the sources Ganander utilized for his etymological discussions. It turns out that almost one half of Ganander’s Old English etymologies are mistaken. It would be wrong, however, to pass a severe judgment on Ganander as a lexicographer. Seen against the background of similar efforts in his own time, Ganander’s lexicographical achievement is valuable even in the area of etymology.
Numerous attempts to discover the origin of yeoman failed to produce definitive results. The element -man poses no difficulties. The problem is yeo-, a relic of some prefix or of an independent word. Among the putative etymons of yeoman two have enjoyed special popularity: *gāman ‘villager’ and yongman ‘young man.’ Neither is fully convincing. The OED cites yeomath ‘a second crop of grass’ and traces yeo- in it and in yeoman to a form of young. However, yeomath has analogues in German and Dutch, where its first element has been explained as meaning ‘additional.’ Consequently, yeoman must have been ‘an additional man/servant.’ Yet some problems pertaining to the circumstances in which the word was coined and to its phonetics remain.
The records of the British East India Company are an uncharted source for historical linguistics and lexicography. In particular, letters between Company employees stationed in the East Indies contain a large amount of colloquial language use. Among the more or less standardized reporting on business matters, there are discussions of all aspects of private life, such as food, drink and, occasionally, sex. This paper investigates a hapax legomenon in the correspondence of early East India Company merchants in Japan (1613–1623): the use of lapidable to mean ‘mature for sexual intercourse.’ The word is traced in Early and Late Modern English dictionaries and primary texts, and the paper ends with a discussion of East India Company merchants and creative language use.
This paper deals with one of the rival French suffixes which now form abstract nouns from verbs in English, as in recite/recital. Such formatives are often seen as semantically interchangeable, forming nouns with the core meaning ‘action/fact of V-ing.’ However, it can be argued that from their earliest appearance in English these suffixes began to select characteristically from a nexus of common meanings, both in the kinds of bases to which each suffix was attached, and in the kinds of contexts in which the formations tended to appear. This paper will suggest that deverbal derivatives in -al with action senses did not appear substantially until the seventeenth century, when a specialised meaning of ‘completed action’ possibly began to be favoured.
Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica contains unnoticed evidence for the processes of transition from Roman to Anglo-Saxon toponymy in early Anglo-Saxon England. Bede uses two different formulas to specify that place-names are English: a gente Anglorum appellatur (‘called by the people of the English’) and lingua Anglorum (‘in the language of the English’). The first phrase is used exclusively of places whose English names show phonetic continuity with Roman ones; the second with a more heterogeneous group which mostly does not show phonetic continuity. This demands explanation. The explanation suggested here is that major places (likely to be spoken of throughout a whole gens) enjoyed greater stability of nomenclature than minor ones.
This article deals mainly with the English Catalogue of Honor (1610) and the Latin Nobilitas Politica vel Civilis (1608), both by Thomas Milles, and the Anglo-Saxon Geþyncðo text that appears in these works. The article focuses on the rise of the 16th-century interest in Anglo-Saxon culture and language, on Lambarde as the editor and translator of early English law texts, the complexity of editorial processes in Early Modern England, the detective work required for establishing the relationship between different versions of one and the same text passage, as well as on the socio-historical background that explains the Latin and English terms for the ranks of nobility in early England (e.g., L comes, colonus; OE eorl, ceorl). The paper also claims that Thomas Milles can be added to the list of translators of Anglo-Saxon laws into Latin.
The paper traces the growth of the lexical field of ‘Contempt’ as represented by the computer-readable file ‘Contempt.txt’ which, together with ‘Disrepute.txt,’ formed the basis for Section ‘02.01.18 Contempt’ of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (2 vols.) published in 2009. Contempt.txt was received in October 2001 from the Thesaurus team. The author put it in tabular form and wrote a computer program to count the number of words attested for any chosen year and any field or sub-field distinguished by the HTE. Though in many ways superseded by the print version, Contempt.txt is still indispensable for the purposes of this paper.
Fencing schools proliferated on the continent during the sixteenth century. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, the rapier arrived in Britain from Italy and Spain, bringing with it an entirely new fencing style. The Italian style was most prominent throughout the age of the rapier, gradually ceding dominance to the French style of small sword play in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and each new style introduced new vocabulary into English and Scots. This lexis is currently being re-examined as part of the revision programme for the Third Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED3) and this paper considers how modern specialist knowledge of historical fencing may inform the editorial process.