Medical practitioners of the sixteenth century had their own body of special terms, just like the doctors of this century. McConchie here examines medical terminology used in a selection of thirteen medical works published between 1530 and 1612, and compares it with the treatment of these words in the OED and other dictionaries of today. His study reveals errors, omissions, and biases that raise important questions for lexicographical tools in general.

Three major developments in English lexicography took place during the seventeenth century: the emergence of the first free standing monolingual English dictionaries; the making of new kinds of English lexicons that investigated dialect or etymology or that keyed English to invented 'philosophical' languages; and the massive expansion of bilingual lexicography, which not only placed English alongside the European vernaculars but also handled the languages of the new world. The essays in this volume discuss not only the internal history of lexicography but also its wider relationships with culture and society.

Laying the foundations for the first monolingual dictionaries of English, the sixteenth century in English lexicography is here shown to form a bridge between the glossarial compilations which had slowly evolved during the Middle Ages, and the more recognisably modern dictionary incorporating synonymy, illustrative citations and other standard features. The articles collected here treat general lexicography and dictionaries in this period, their uses, and the state of research in this field. The volume also covers a fascinating and diverse collection of lexicographers, from the well known - John Palsgrave, Thomas Cooper, Thomas Elyot and John Florio - to those about whom next to nothing is known - Richard Howlet, John Baret and Peter Levens.

Sir Thomas Elyot's Latin-English dictionary became the leading work of its kind. Gabriele Stein examines its principles, methods, and organization, and the texts and authors Elyot used as sources. She considers the book's impact on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dictionaries and assesses its place in Renaissance lexicography.

Words and dictionaries from the British Isles in historical perspective brings together a wide range of current work on English-language lexicography and lexicology by a team of twelve contributors working in England, continental Europe, and North America. Fredric Dolezal’s opening essay offers a provocative discussion of how the history of English lexicography has been, and might in the future be, written. The next four papers deal with the medieval and early modern periods: Carter Hailey investigates the dictionary evidence for individual lexical creativity in a discussion of Chaucer and the Middle English Dictionary; Gabriele Stein shows how early modern English dictionaries handled lexicological questions rather than simply listing words and equivalents; R. W. McConchie analyzes the biographical record of the lexicographer Richard Howlet, and Paola Tornaghi presents and discusses an unpublished source for the seventeenth-century lexicography of Old English. Three papers on the long eighteenth century follow: Noel Osselton’s is an analysis of the “alphabet fatigue” which led many early lexicographers to treat words at the end of the alphabetical sequence more tersely than words at the beginning; Elisabetta Lonati’s shows the engagement of John Harris’s Lexicon technicum with one of the sources of its medical vocabulary; Charlotte Brewer’s discusses the under-representation of eighteenth-century material in the Oxford English Dictionary. In the last three papers, Julie Coleman provides a groundbreaking analysis of Farmer and Henley’s Slang and its analogues; Peter Gilliver draws on the Oxford English Dictionary archives to tell the story of an important editorial crisis; and Laura Pinnavaia discusses the syntactic flexibility of a set of idioms in a corpus of nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose. The volume as a whole offers new discoveries and important analytical and conceptual work, and is an essential text in the developing field of the history of lexicography.

Discovery in Haste is the first book to survey the English printed medical dictionary, a greatly under-researched area, from Andrew Boorde's Breviary of Helthe of 1547 to Benjamin Lara’s surgical dictionary of 1796. The book begins with Andrew Boorde’s Breviary of Helthe of 1547, moves on to medical glossaries, which were produced through the whole period, the ‘physical dictionaries’ of the mid-seventeenth century which first employed ‘dictionary’ in the title, the translation into English of Steven Blancard’s dictionary, Latin medical dictionaries of the late seventeenth century by Thomas Burnet and John Cruso, the influential dictionary by John Quincy which dominated the eighteenth century, surgical dictionaries through to that by Benjamin Lara, Robert James’s massive encyclopaedic dictionary and the work derived from it by John Barrow, as well as George Motherby’s dictionary of 1775. The characteristics of each are discussed and their inter-relationships explored. Attention is also paid to the printing history and the way the publishers influenced the works and, where appropriate, to the influence each had on succeeding dictionaries. This book is the first to locate medical dictionaries within the history of lexicography.

How did a single genre of text have the power to standardise the English language across time and region, rival the Bible in notions of authority, and challenge our understanding of objectivity, prescription, and description? Since the first monolingual dictionary appeared in 1604, the genre has sparked evolution, innovation, devotion, plagiarism, and controversy. This comprehensive volume presents an overview of essential issues pertaining to dictionary style and content and a fresh narrative of the development of English dictionaries throughout the centuries. Essays on the regional and global nature of English lexicography (dictionary making) explore its power in standardising varieties of English and defining nations seeking independence from the British Empire: from Canada to the Caribbean. Leading scholars and lexicographers historically contextualise an array of dictionaries and pose urgent theoretical and methodological questions relating to their role as tools of standardisation, prestige, power, education, literacy, and national identity.