Shift Towards Semantics
narrative of the history of English dictionaries usually follows a
line starting with Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall
(1604), moving through Bullokar, Cockeram, Blount, Phillips, Kersey
and Bailey, and ending with Johnson as both the apotheosis of early
dictionary-making and the first modern English dictionary. The
earliest dictionaries tended to concentrate on lexis, on 'hard
words', and gave a simple explanation of their meaning. So, for
example, Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656) gives:
gentle, courteous, meek, mild, humble, tractable.
gentleness, meekness, tractableness, humility.
to do a thing closely, as to pick a purse.
words selected for inclusion are generally either of Latinate origin
or technical terms, deriving from specialised areas of knowledge
such as law, medicine, botany, mathematics and the collection of
these words in dictionaries was meant for the use of young scholars,
clerks, foreigners and other who need help with the specialist
vocabulary of the new learning, including women, rather than for
general readers. The meanings are divided into separate senses, but
no indication is given of the usage of these words. When, for
example, did 'mansuete' mean 'courteous' and when did it mean
'humble'? Are there specialised domains for these meanings or not?
It is impossible to tell from the definitions given by Blount.
narrative of this history is confined to monolingual,
non-specialised dictionaries and these early dictionaries are
characterised as 'hard words' dictionaries because their wordlists
are supposed to consist of highly Latinate, difficult words that
perhaps were never really used in the general language. This view is
strengthened by the belief that monolingual dictionaries grew and
developed out of bilingual dictionaries, in particular Latin-English
dictionaries, based on the observation that early dictionary-makers
seem to have merely anglicized the lemmas and copied out the English
entry as the definition. Johnson's Dictionary, on the other
hand, includes common words, and notoriously some which are
difficult to define in similarly common words, such as 'drier'
defined as 'dessicative'. It has long been recognised that Johnson
was not the first to include common words, since Kersey and Bailey
did so before him, but there has been a sense that he was the first
to do so in a systematic way and to apply the same careful standards
of definition to these words as to 'hard words'.
was a shift in emphasis in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries away from a focus on lexis, which had dominated linguistic
thinking in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, and towards
semantics, there being a new urgency about establishing unique and
transparent meanings for words. This shift is reflected in the
dictionaries which were produced: earlier dictionaries tend to be
wordlists with minimal definitions, like the glossaries which they
grew out of, and later dictionaries tend to pay increasing attention
to careful delineation of senses. However, Jürgen Schäfer and Noel
Osselton, among others, have cautioned against assuming that all
early dictionary-makers were concerned only with 'hard words'.
Osselton's discovery of an unknown lexicographer, whose partial
manuscript of a dictionary he found in the Bodleian, shows that even
the very earliest dictionaries might have contained such common
words as 'apple' and 'ale', and Schäfer points out that Cawdrey's
dictionary contains 'hard usuall words', an emphasis that is
not often noted.