This study by Starnes and Noyes was immediately recognized as a unique and pioneering work of scholarship and has long been the standard work on the emergence and early flowering of English lexicography. Within the last 20 years we have been witnessing a remarkable scholarly interest in the study of dictionary-making and the role played by dictionaries in the transmission and preservation of knowledge and learning. It is therefore essential to have this classic work available again to all students of linguistic history. In its new edition the book has been vastly enhanced by a lengthy and invaluable introduction by Gabriele Stein, Professor of English Linguistics in Heidelberg and author of The English Dictionary before Cawdrey (1985). In her introduction to the present volume she sets out in scholarly detail the work that has emerged since 1946, which makes this study of the English dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson as complete as the original authors themselves would have wished.

This book serves as a welcome addition to the better known "English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, 1604-1755," by Starnes & Noyes (new edition published by Benjamins 1991). Whereas Starnes & Noyes describe the history of English lexicography as an evolutionary progress-by-accumulation process, Professor Hayashi focuses on issues of method and theory, starting with John Palsgrave's "Lesclarissement de la langue francoyse" (1530), to John Walker's "A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language" (1791). This book also includes a detailed discussion of Dr. Johnson's influential "Dictionary of the English Language" (1755).

This book deals with monolingual English dictionaries from 1604 to 1702. The major scholarly reference works which individually treat early English dictionaries are De Witt Starnes and Gertrude Noyes’s English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson: 1604–1755 (1946) and The Oxford History of English Lexicography (2009) edited by A. P. Cowie. However, when we proceed with reading the dictionaries with primary attention to their provision of lexical information, an array of deficiencies in Starnes and Noyes’s account stands out. There are two main reasons for these deficiencies; one is the fact that Starnes and Noyes’s analyses of the dictionaries are mainly made in accordance with the contents of their title pages and introductory materials, and the other is that the two authorities are excessively conscious of the external history of the dictionaries they discuss. The method of investigation of the dictionaries in this book differs greatly from these previous studies. Through it, various facts, which have been unnoticed for centuries, come to be revealed, including not only an array of historically significant methods for the lexical treatment of words and phrases, but also the highly creative use of other dictionaries in one specific dictionary, as well as the previously unrecognized direct and indirect influence of one dictionary on others.