Chosen words

What do our dictionaries owe to the past? This informative collection of studies shows how current dictionary techniques have grown from the small beginnings of lexicography in the time of Shakespeare. Discussion is anchored in the practice of the past, but the author has been concerned throughout to show how the difficulties which beset the first compilers are still with us today. The essays may thus be read as a stimulating, even chastening, introduction to some of the practical problems that might confront any trainee lexicographer. The product of over forty years' scholarly work on Cawdrey, Kersey, Bailey, Johnson and other lexicographers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these essays cover a wide variety of topics, including dialect words, variant spellings, how strict the alphabetical order can or should be, the treatment of phrasal verbs, of the literary and learned language, of common words, archaism and figurative usage. There are also critical assessments of some of the great historical dictionaries of Europe.