chambers dictionary of etymology 1988 edition

Nathaniel Bailey's folio Dictionarium Britannicum (1730) is in the same tradition but with a new emphasis on scientific and industrial matters: for example, with a page on orrery, and 17 items on the metal lead. By the 5th edition in 1696, it had grown to about 17,000 items and in 1706 was revised and further enlarged by John Kersey. His folio volume had its hard words, but was altogether grander and more inclusive.

A novel approach emerged, however, in the New World of English Words (1658) by Edward Phillips, a nephew of Milton and a miscellaneous hack writer. The hardword tradition went on into the 18c in the work of John Kersey and Nathaniel Bailey, and traces survive in such traditional works as the Chambers English Dictionary (1988).

They were highly derivative, drawing in particular on the older Latin-English dictionaries, and answered a real need: Cockeram went through 12 editions to 1670 and the last of many printings of Bullokar was in 1775. Such works were concerned only with ‘hard words’, the classical vocabulary of Renaissance English: they bristled with ‘Terms of Art’, the technical and semitechnical words coined by geographers, mathematicians, doctors, and others. It was followed by John Bullokar's English Expositor (1616), Henry Cockeram's English Dictionarie (1623), the first to be given that name, and Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656), which had some 9,000 words, fuller definitions, and etymologies. It was designed for quick consultation by ‘Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons’, to help them understand and use foreign borrowings. The first published dictionary of English was Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall (1604), which contained fewer than 3,000 ‘hard vsuall English wordes’ listed alphabetically in roman type with the barest of explanations in black letter: Dulcor, sweetnesse Placable, easie to be pleased. The need for a work in which harder English words were explained by easier English words arose in the late 16c. A typical work that made Latin words accessible through English glosses was the Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum (Storehouse for little ones or clerics) of Galfridus Grammaticus ( Geoffrey the Grammarian), compiled around 1440. Over two thousand years later in medieval Europe, the same principle was used when scribes who spoke vernacular languages learned to read and write in Latin the first European dictionaries were bilingual lists of (difficult) words of Latin explained in the vernacular of the learners in question. The lists came into existence because the Akkadians (Babylonians) had inherited through conquest the culture and traditions of Sumer and used the sets of signs as a means by which their scribes could learn what was, in effect, the classical language of writing. Even after the invention of the alphabet later in the same millennium many centuries passed before alphabetic ordering became a common tool for organizing information. They were Sumerian and Akkadian words inscribed in parallel columns on clay tablets in cuneiform writing and were organized thematically.

The earliest known prototypes of the dictionary were West Asian bilingual word lists of the second millennium BC. In computing, the term refers to both a list of codes, terms, keys, etc., and their meanings, as used in computer programs, and a list of words (often drawn from a conventional dictionary) against which spellings can be checked. Among the many kinds of dictionary, the commonest contrast is between monolingual or unilingual dictionaries that list and define the words of one language and bilingual dictionaries that offer the equivalents of Language A in Language B, and vice versa. Such books are so closely associated with alphabetized entries that the phrase dictionary order is synonymous with alphabetic( al) order, but in fact since the Middle Ages many works called ‘dictionaries’ have been differently arranged, and a wide range of reference books, including thesauruses and gazetteers, are referred to for convenience as ‘dictionaries’. DICTIONARY A generic name for a kind of reference book, usually devoted to the definition of words entered in alphabetic order, such as the Collins English Dictionary, but also including works of an encyclopedic nature, such as The Oxford Dictionary of Natural History.

Chambers dictionary of etymology 1988 edition