Research Catalog

Title

Chosen words : past and present problems for dictionary makers / N.E. Osselton.

Author

Osselton, N. E.

Publication

Exeter, England : University of Exeter Press, 1995.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

x, 188 pages; 23 cm.

Summary

• 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.

Series Statement

Exeter linguistics studies

Uniform Title

Exeter linguistic studies.

Subjects

• Lexicography
• Language and languages > Etymology
• Encyclopedias and dictionaries

Contents

• 1. The Character of the Earliest English Dictionaries -- 2. Figurative Words: Modern Practice and the Origins of a Labelling Tradition -- 3. Common Words: John Kersey and the First General Dictionary of English -- 4. Dialect Words in General Dictionaries -- 5. Old Words: Defining Obsolescence -- 6. Literary Words: Blount's Glossographia and Sir Thomas Browne -- 7. Setting up a New Bilingual Vernacular Dictionary: Henry Hexham (1647) -- 8. Style Markers: Early Bilingual Dictionaries and English Usage -- 9. Fixing the Spelling: Errour and Honor in Johnson and Bailey -- 10. Phrasal Verbs: Dr Johnson's Use of Bilingual Sources -- 11. A Dictionary Compiler at Work in the Sixteenth Century -- 12. Alphabetization in Early Dictionaries of English -- 13. An Eighteenth-Century Bilingualized Learners' Dictionary -- 14. Secondary Documentation in Historical Lexicography -- 15. Dictionary Criticism: Three Historical Dictionaries --
• 16. Bilingual Dictionaries with Dutch: a Case Study in European Lexicography.

ISBN

0859894193

LCCN

gb 95082866

OCLC

ocm33233110

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries