Browse Items (10 total)

Although Martin strove for comprehensive coverage of all the common words in the language, he refused to swell his word count with inkhornisms never used in real life. His typography, though unattractive, is innovative, with hanging indentation to…

Martin, the son of a farmer, was an inventor with an inventor’s temperament: he sought out problems and systematically set about solving them. He developed a portable microscope, a clock mechanism, and a bilge pump he tried unsuccessfully to sell to…

The schoolmaster and textbook author Dyche died in 1727, leaving A New General English Dictionary unfinished. It was completed over the next eight years by one William Pardon, of whom little is known.  Dyche & Pardon’s effort has been called “largely…

Daniel Defoe’s last letter describes his many “insupportable sorrows.” Among these was that his estranged son Benjamin, who had abandoned law to become a hack writer, was languishing in prison for seditious writing. Benjamin produced a dictionary…

Bailey’s second major dictionary, the Dictionarium Britannicum, is a significant advance over its predecessor. Definitions are still perfunctory—crow, “a bird well known”—but he justifiably claimed to treat “several 1000 English Words and Phrases, in…

Nathan Bailey was the most important English lexicographer before Johnson. His early publications grew out of his experience as a schoolmaster, including a Latin textbook that went through 22 authorized editions.  The Universal Etymological English…

John Quincy studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh at a time of intellectual ferment in the natural sciences. His most enduring work is this Lexicon, a thorough updating of Bartolomeo Castelli’s Lexicon Medicum (1598) in the light of modern…

This Glossographia—no relation to Blount’s book of the same title from 1656—focuses especially on words used in the learned professions. Its treatment of technical vocabulary is especially strong: liquidescency, lispound, litation, lithontripicks.…

Harris’s Lexicon Technicum, which was impressively au courant with the latest in microscopy and Newtonian physics, has been called the first encyclopedia of science and technology. The categories of “dictionary” and “encyclopedia” had yet to be…

A teacher of writing and arithmetic, Cocker ventured into publishing with copybooks for schoolchildren. Cocker’s English Dictionary, which first appeared 28 years after Cocker’s death, shows confusion about what a dictionary is. Though small, it’s…