The first secure attestations of the English word queer, as noun and as adjective, with reference to sexuality, appear to be from 1914, and that fact helps to explain the somewhat enigmatic title of this book. Its primary texts are monolingual English dictionaries compiled before the word queer was widely available in this sense, from the Table alphabeticall of Robert Cawdrey (1537/8–1604?) to the first Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED 1933OED 1933 The Oxford English Dictionary […] Supplement and Bibliography. Ed. W. A. Craigie and C. T. Onions. Oxford: Clarendon.), and it gives an account of how they treated, or failed to treat, words which represented what might now be called queer sexuality — with the proviso that ‘What is queer in the twentieth or twenty-first century might not have been in the nineteenth’ (p. 8).

A source which Turton cites several times calls for a “Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies” which will “expose and seek remedies against social/cultural inequalities and injustices” by “looking into and revealing the hidden power relations in lexicographical practice” (Chen 2019Chen, Wenge 2019 “Towards a Discourse Approach to Critical Lexicography”. International Journal of Lexicography 32.3.362–388. : 368). More specifically, he writes that his book “takes its cue from the research tradition of queer linguistics” (p. 4), a field in which there has, since the first decade of the present century, been “a continued rise in studies challenging and critiquing dominant cultural norms associated with gender and sexuality” (Jones 2021Jones, Lucy 2021 “Queer linguistics and identity: The past decade”. Journal of Lamguage and Sexuality 10(1).13–24. : 19). As these words may suggest, “the sights of queer linguistics have been trained more often on the current moment than the last century”, and Turton identifies “doing queer linguistic history” as therefore an emerging field (p. 197). He cites the anthropologist and linguist William Leap as another worker in this field, and Leap writes one of the endorsements on the back cover, stating that Before the Word Was Queer “uses a scavenger methodology to expose privileged voices repeatedly erasing references to marginalized sexuality in English dictionaries”. The words which he italicizes are a quotation from the scholar of gender studies Jack Halberstam: “A queer methodology, in a way, is a scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human behaviour” (1998: 13). The themes of this book include the challenge and critique of dominant cultural norms; the revealing of hidden power relations; the erasure of references to marginalized sexuality; and the deliberate or accidental exclusion of human subjects from the historical record.

Turton shows his quality as a historian in his opening pages. The Oxford English Dictionary documents the use of queer in the sense “A homosexual person; esp. a homosexual man”, citing a piece of evidence from before 1914, namely a letter of 1894 from the ninth marquess of Queensberry, denouncing “Snob Queers like Roseberry & certainly Christian hypocrite Gladstone” ( OED 2000–OED 2000– The Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. Michael Proffitt et al. 3rd edn. 〈www​.oed​.com〉., s.v. queer, n², sense 2a, citing Ellmann 1987Ellmann, Richard 1987 Oscar Wilde. London: Hamish Hamilton.: 402). That seems clear enough: the source is the renowned biography of Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann (1918–1987), who owned the manuscript of the letter, and transcribed it in full. Not satisfied with working from Ellmann’s transcription, however, Turton has pursued the manuscript to its present home at the University of Tulsa, in Oklahoma, and has re-read it. His own transcription reads “Snob Queer Liar Roseberry & Canting Christian hypocrite Gladstone”, and he reproduces the manuscript to show that this transcription is more convincing than Ellmann’s, before arguing that, if that is so, queer is more probably being used in the semantic range “of questionable character, suspicious, dubious” than as a sexual slur (pp. 5–8, citing OED 2000–OED 2000– The Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. Michael Proffitt et al. 3rd edn. 〈www​.oed​.com〉., s.v. queer, adj.¹, sense 1). The case could be discussed further, but what matters here is that Turton’s critical work entails the precise, searching reading of a wide variety of historical documents. His sources include numerous printed dictionaries — some of them, rightly, consulted in multiple editions (for instance, Bullokar 1616B[ullokar], J[ohn] 1616 An English expositor. London: by John Legatt., 1654B[ullokar], J[ohn] 1654 An English expositor. Ed. W. S. New edn. London: by J. L., to be sold by Edward Brewster., and 1663B[ullokar], J[ohn] 1663 An English expositor. Ed. ‘A lover of the arts’. London: by J. Field, to be sold by Thomas Williams.) — and unpublished dictionary materials such as two interesting annotated copies of Grose’s Classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue (1785[Grose, Francis] 1785 A classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue. London: for S. Hooper.), and of course the extensive working materials surviving from the Oxford English dictionary project.

The five central chapters overlap chronologically. At the centre of the first is the lexicographical coverage of the words buggery and sodomy, from the seventeenth-century hard-word dictionaries to mid-nineteenth-century general and legal dictionaries. The second moves on to the ways in which “terms for same-sex acts and their actors […] are recurrently cast as an alien transgression into the English language” (p. 83) in dictionaries of the same broad period, whether in etymologies or in the text of explanations. The third turns to omissions, and particularly to the omission of words for sex between women, from the hard-word dictionaries to Slang and its Analogues, the great work of J. S Farmer (1854–1916) and W. E. Henley (1849–1903). The fourth focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical dictionaries, and the fifth on the first edition, and first supplement, of the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED 1884–1928OED 1884–1928 A New English Dictionary / The Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. J. A. H. Murray, et al. Oxford: Clarendon. and OED 1933OED 1933 The Oxford English Dictionary […] Supplement and Bibliography. Ed. W. A. Craigie and C. T. Onions. Oxford: Clarendon.). A concluding chapter looks forward through the twentieth century to the present day, and a long appendix gathers the dictionary entries on which the book is founded, from androcoetesis “The veneral act; or the infamous act of sodomy”, in a medical dictionary of 1797, to windward passage as in “One who uses, or navigates the windward passage; a sodomite”, in a slang dictionary of 1811. The index nominum et rerum is the work of a professional indexer, and it is of a high standard, as is the copy-editing; an index verborum would also have been useful.

This is a fine and successful book. Historians of sexuality and historians of the language sciences alike will find its arguments stimulating and well-founded when it is read as a whole, and will value it as a compendium of information about individual words in the dictionary record, to be revisited regularly. It has already been hailed as “a wonderfully rich mine of forgotten sexual slang” and for “its recognition that dictionary-makers and users are actors in the construction of social and sexual identities” (Tosh 2024Tosh, Will 2024 “Urning and larking: How the English dictionary came to terms with same-sex relations” [review of Turton, Before the Word was Queer ]. Times Literary Supplement, 19 July, 26.: 26/3). I would like to discuss the presence of dictionary users in this book a little further, before turning to two other questions which it raises: the importance of silence in the dictionary record, and the extent to which dictionaries can be read separately from other historical sources.

But first, one small criticism: Turton is, occasionally, a little high-handed in his comments on lexicographers of the past. Thomas Blount (1618–1679) is accused of “ignorance” for being unsure as to whether hypospadian, a hapax legomenon which he had seen used in a Scottish news report to refer to someone who had had sex with a horse, might actually reflect a learned form in ἱππο- rather than ὑπο- (p. 124, citing Blount 1656B[lount], T[homas] 1656 Glossographia. London: by Thomas Newcomb for Humphrey Moseley and George Sawbridge., s.v. hypospadians): the relationship between bestiality and the condition called ὑποσπαδίας in ancient Greek and hypospadias in post-classical Latin is in fact not obvious, and I think Blount’s caution is to be respected. (To reverse the cases, it would surely be unfair to accuse Turton of ignorance when he twice renders the name of Blount’s Νομο-λεξικον as Νομο-γεξικον.) R. G. Latham (1812–1888) gives the etymology of catamite as “? Ganymede. ? Sodomite”, and Turton calls this “curious” (p. 69, citing Latham 1866–1870Latham, R. G. 1866–70 A Dictionary of the English Language, Founded on That of Dr. Samuel Johnson. London: Longmans [etc.]., s.v. catamite), but Latin catamitus is indeed usually derived from the Greek name Γανυμήδης, via its Etruscan form Catmite (but see Bakkum 2009Bakkum, Gabriël C. L. M. 2009 The Latin Dialect of the Ager Faliscus. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.: 203), and so it neither seems curious that Latham offered the derivation from Ganymede, nor that he was unaware of Catmite, nor that he should have considered contamination by another form in -mite as he sought to explain how -mite came from -mede.

Returning to larger themes in Before the Word was Queer, we begin with dictionary users. Turton has found a very interesting one, the traveller and landowner Anne Lister (1791–1840), whose diaries, running to four million words or more, partly in cipher, have much to say about her lesbianism. Lister is a well-known figure in the history of gender and sexuality (see, e.g., Halberstam 1998Halberstam, Jack 1998 Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.: 66–73), and the protagonist of a television drama (Wainwright 2019–22Wainwright, Sally 2019–22 Gentleman Jack. 16 episodes in 2 series. BBC One / HBO.). She made a remarkable, though short, erotic glossary, based on several printed dictionaries, and edited by Turton in an appendix. She also recorded her own erotic reading of a dictionary: after reading a description in Juvenal of a woman worshipping “Medullinae fluctum crissantis” (the undulating movement of Medullina crissans), she

Sat up look[in]g at so[me] w[or]ds in Littleton’s Lat[in] Dict[ionar]y crisso is for a woman to bend herself impudently see the greek verb riknoosee thinking of these things after getting into bed in a state of great excitement for a good while and afterwards it is ssad to confess another cross.11. Lister 1819–21Lister, Anne 1819–21 Diary of Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, 23 November 1819 to 10 February 1821 [transcription of West Yorkshire Archive Service, Calderdale, SH:7/ML/E/4]. 〈wyascatablogue​.wordpress​.com​/exhibitions​/anne​-lister​/anne​-lister​-reading​-annes​-diaries/〉.: 129, adapting Littleton 1678Littleton, Adam 1678 Linguae latinae liber dictionarius quadripartitus. London: for T. Basset, J. Wright, and R. Chiswell., s.v. crissans, “Wagging her breech”, and also drawing on ibid., s.v. crisso, where the Greek equivalent ῥικνοῦσθαι is given; for this word, Lister probably turned to Scapula 1652Scapula, Johannes 1652 Lexicon graeco–latinum. London: impensis Iosuae Kirton et Samuelis Thomson. (or another edition), s.v. ῥικνόομαι, ῥικνοῦμαι, ‘indecenter me flecto; in saltando lumbis incurvatis agitor’ (‘I bend myself indecently; I twerk’). The italicized words in the quotation are in cipher in the original; cross was Lister’s private word for orgasm.

Turton has published two other pieces on Anne Lister and dictionaries in the last three years (Turton 2022Turton, Stephen 2022 “The lexicographical lesbian: Remaking the body in Anne Lister’s erotic glossary”. Review of English Studies 73.537–551. , Turton 2023Turton, Stephen 2023 “ ‘My use of the word love’: Lister, language, and the dictionary”. In Decoding Anne Lister: From the Archives to ‘Gentleman Jack’, edited by Caroline Gonda and Chris Roulston, 73–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ), and one can see why he is drawn to her as a subject: her diaries give us an exceptional picture of a queer dictionary reader in action. But exceptional is to the point: Turton imagines other readers making a similar “trespass into knowledge” (p. 116), but presents no evidence for their activity.

Silence is a difficult historical subject, and it is admirably handled in several passages. For instance, Turton demonstrates the excision of references to Sappho’s same-sex relationships in biographical entries in dictionaries, and in biographical encyclopedias (pp. 76–83). He shows a marked dip in the number of “same-sex headwords” in general dictionaries between 1755 and 1830 (pp. 99–102) and in slang dictionaries after Grose (1785)[Grose, Francis] 1785 A classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue. London: for S. Hooper. (pp. 113–14). Particularly interesting and effective is his treatment of the Oxford English Dictionary up to 1933, where he shows how editors weakened draft definitions, as at catamite; omitted citations, as at bugger; avoided good clear citations, as at tribadism; or omitted sexual senses of words, as at lesbian and lesbianism, where William Craigie (1867–1957) apparently decided to omit, and his co-editor Charles Onions (1873–1965) protested against the decision (pp. 150–65).22.Turton rightly notes that the letter in which Onions made his protest was first discussed in Brewer 2007Brewer, Charlotte 2007 Treasure-House of the Language: The Living OED. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. (49–50 and 205); see also Gilliver (2016Gilliver, Peter 2016 The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. : 400).

But sometimes, too much is made of apparent reticences and omissions. When early legal texts explained the words sodomy and buggery, for instance, they sometimes “indicated at least some of the ways they could be physically enacted”, which leads Turton to the question “Could lexicographers not have done the same?” (p. 43). Likewise, he reflects on the entries for catamite, pathic, and so on, that “the receptive partner’s own sexual agency is mostly erased from these definitions” (p. 68). It is surely fair to say that, whatever word is being explained, the explanations in early English dictionaries are very seldom as rich, detailed, and sensitive as the ideal which is being imagined in these passages.

Nor is the omission of a word from an early English dictionary always to be taken as a matter of “privileged voices repeatedly erasing references to marginalized sexuality” (William Leap’s words, not Turton’s, but they are a sympathetic summary of what Leap found in Turton’s book). For instance, Nathan Bailey encountered the word confricatrices in a medical dictionary, and included it in his own general dictionary, with the explanation “so some Authors call lustful Women, who titulate one another with their Clitoris, in imitation of Venereal Intercourses with Men” (Bailey 1724Bailey, Nathan 1724 An Universal Etymological English Dictionary. 2nd edn. London: for E. Bell [et al.]., s.v., based closely on Quincy 1722Quincy, John 1722 Lexicon physico-medicum. 2nd edn. London: for E. Bell, W. Taylor, and J. Osborn., s.v.). Turton says that this “may be the first headword in a general English dictionary to refer explicitly and exclusively to women who have sex with women” (p. 91). So far, so good, but then he continues “The confricatrix does not appear in subsequent general dictionaries” (p. 92), and this is more contentious. Excluding very rare words from dictionaries is something which lexicographers do all the time, and confricatrix / confricatrices was indeed extremely rare in English, though it is to be found here and there in neo-Latin medical texts.33.The only pre-1800 instances which I have found in English-language texts other than dictionaries are in Bartholin (1668Bartholin, Thomas 1668 Anatomy. Trans. under the names of Nicholas Culpeper and Abdiah Cole. London: by John Streater.: 76), Diemerbroeck (1694Diemerbroeck, Ysbrand van 1694 The Anatomy of Human Bodies. Trans. William Salmon. London: for W. Whitwood.: i, 183), and Parsons (1741Parsons, James 1741 A mechanical and critical enquiry into the nature of hermaphrodites. London: for J. Walthoe.: 21 etc.); the Latin word is attested from Pineau (1597Pineau, Séverin 1597 Opusculum physiologum et anatomicum. Paris: e typographia Steph. Preuosteau.: 63) onwards. But turning confricatrices into “the confricatrix” turns the sensible exclusion of a marginal word into the act of making a person invisible.

Finally, the question of the separateness of dictionaries from texts of other kinds is always a tricky one, and it is sometimes insoluble. So, for instance, Turton sees Andrew Boorde’s Breuiary of Helthe (1547) as a dictionary, as does the historian of lexicography Roderick McConchie (2019McConchie, Roderick 2019 Discovery in haste: English medical dictionaries and lexicographers 1547 to 1796. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. : 33), whereas I have argued that it is not (Considine 2022Considine, John 2022 Sixteenth-century English dictionaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. : 69–70): we can surely agree to differ. However, the question presents itself in a different form when dictionaries are being read thematically, as they are in this study, for it is sometimes hard to see why their treatment of a theme calls for separate investigation. For instance, Turton discusses both dictionaries and biographical encyclopedias as he considers the reputation of Sappho, but it seems odd to separate these sources from all the other representations of Sappho contemporary with them (for which see, e.g., DeJean 1989DeJean, Joan 1989 Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press., not cited by Turton). Likewise, when he describes the treatment of the word buggery in general dictionaries, law dictionaries, and other legal texts, it is not clear that the dictionaries are doing something highly distinctive. Perhaps the point is that for some dictionary readers, the dictionary is a contextless source of information: the person who reads Cawdrey’s entry buggerie will learn that it refers to “co[n]iunction with one of the same kinde, or of men with beasts” (1604, s.v.), and if they have never met the word before, that is all they will know about it. But surely dictionaries are more often used by people who have met words in other contexts, and want to know more, like Anne Lister finding crissans in Littleton. Might an ideal reading of Cawdrey on buggerie say more about the use of the word in other contexts? To ask this is to ask whether a historical study of dictionary entries can ever stand alone as a historical study of the people or practices to which they refer.

That is the sort of question which is bound to be asked about a highly original book. Before the Word was Queer is a strong and interesting contribution to the history of the language sciences, and if it sometimes provokes disagreement, that is what historical writing should do.