DICTIONARIES

Dr Samuel Johnson

_ Dates and statistics

_ The plan of the dictionary published in1747

_ Dictionary completed in 1755

_ Definitions of 40,000 words

_ 114 quotations to illustrate usage
Objectives:
_ To fix the English language although language is the work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be derived
_ Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, will require that it should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make init
without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify.
_… tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language.
(from the Preface to Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, 1755)
_ To preserve the purity and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom
_ To provide a dictionary for popular use.

Criteria used in preparing the dictionary:

_ The inclusion of foreign words

_ the peculiar words of every profession
_ the names of species –even though they required so their accents should be settled,

their sounds ascertained, and their etymologies deduced.

_ to settle the orthography, or spelling of words:

_ The chief rule which I propose to follow, is to make no innovations, without a reason sufficient to balance the inconvenience of change; and such reason I do not expect often to find

_ To produce a guide to pronunciation –the accentuation of polysyllables and the pronunciation of monosyllables.

_ To consider the etymology or derivation of words
_ Interpreting the words with brevity, fullness and perspicuity

_ Assigning words to classes –general, poetic, obsolete, used by individual writers, used only

in burlesque writing, impure and barbarous

_ He is credited with standardizing spelling although …

_ his spellings gave precedence to preserving a word's etymology or origin rather than its sound.

_ lexicographer, ‘a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge’

_ Johnson declared his intention to “ascertain” or fix pronunciation, “the stability of which is of great importance to the duration of a language” (1747: 11).

_When the dictionary was published, eight years later, entry words came only with an indication of stress-position, hence CO'MELY or INDETERMINA'TION.

To FRE'NCHIFY. v. a. [from French.] To infect with the manner of France ; to make a coxcomb.

They miſliked nothing more in King Edward the Confeſſor than that he was Frenchified; and

accounted the deſire of foreign language then to be a foretoken of bringing in foreign powers,

which indeed happened. Camden’s Remains.

Has he familiarly diſlik'd

Your yellow ſtarch, or ſaid vour doublet

Was not exactly Frenchified?

Shakſp

_ COUGH, n.ſ. [kuch, Dutch.] A convulſion of the lungs vellicated by ſome ſharp feruſity. It is pronounced coff.
In conſumptions of the lungs, when nature cannot expel thr cough, nen fall into fluxes of the belly,
and then they die. Bacon’s Natural

Hiſtory. For his dear ſake long reſtleſs nights you bore, While rattling coughs his heaving veſſels tore.

Smith

Noah Webster American Dictionary of the English Language (1828)

_Webster resented the fact that America children learnt from books imported from

England.

_ He thought the English in Britain was corrupted by the aristocracy’s obsession

with Latin and Greek.

_ His books were based on the republican principle of popular sovereignty.

Noah Webster American Dictionary

of the English Language (1828)

Successful Unsuccessful

Gaol jail ache ake

Mould mold soup soop

Travelled traveled sleigh sley

Honour honor sponge spunge

centre center tongue tung

humour humor cloak cloke

masque mask determine determin

publick public women wimmen

Oxford English Dictionary, 1928

_ The essential feature of the dictionary is its historical method, by which the meaning and

form of the words are traced from their earliest appearance on the basis of an immense

number of quotations, collected by more than 800 voluntary workers.

_ The dictionary contains a record of 414,825 words, whose history is illustrated by 1,827,306 quotations.

_ 1933-1986: Supplements to the OED

_ 1980s: The Supplements are integrated with the OED to produce its Second Edition.

_ 1992: The first CD-ROM version of the OED is published.

_ 1992: The first CD-ROM version of the OED is published.

_ James Murray (1837-1915)

_ Henry Bradley (1845-1923)

_ William Craigie (1867-1957)

_ C.T. Onions (1873-1965)

_ Robert Burchfield (1923-2004)

_ Edmund Weiner (b. 1950)

_ John Simpson (b. 1953)

Cobuild Dictionary

_ The first COBUILD dictionary was published in 1987.

_ It was the first of a new generation of dictionaries that were based on real examples of English - the type of English that people speak and write every day.

_ Collins and the University of Birmingham, led by John Sinclair, developed an electronic corpus in the 1980s, which is where these examples of English were taken from.

_ The corpus, known as the Bank of English™, became the largest collection of English in the world and COBUILD uses the corpus to analyze the way that people really use the language.