“ The quotations are for the most part provided with references, but they are not dated. Even when compared with the much larger New English Dictionary, the Century’s great merit is the excellent enumeration of meanings, and the accuracy of its explanations; in this respect it is often better and fuller than the New English. In the application of the encyclopaedic method this dictionary is conservative, excluding, with a few exceptions, proper names, and restricting, for the most part, the encyclopaedic matter to descriptive and other details which may legitimately be added to the definitions. ”

“ In Germany this substitution had already been effected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their dictionary of the German language, the first volume of which appeared in 1854. In brief, then, the modern view is that the general dictionary of a language should be a record of all the words—current or obsolete—of that language, with all their meanings and uses, but should not attempt to be, except secondarily or indirectly, a guide to “good” usage. A “standard” dictionary has, in fact, been recognized to be an impossibility, if not an absurdity. ”

“ The work of collecting quotations was begun in 1894, and the first part of the first volume has been published.
In the making of all these great dictionaries (except, of course, the last) the needs of the general public as well as those of scholars have been kept in view. But the type to which the general dictionary designed for popular use has tended more and more to conform is the encyclopaedic. This combination of lexicon and encyclopaedia is exhibited in an extreme—and theoretically objectionable—form in the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIX e siècle of Pierre Larousse. ”

“ Lexicon is a corresponding word of Greek origin, meaning a book of or for words—a dictionary. A glossary is properly a collection of unusual or foreign words requiring explanation. It is the name frequently given to English dictionaries of dialects, which the Germans usually call idioticon, and the Italians vocabolario. ”

“ And small dictionaries are more convenient for frequent use, as in translating from an unfamiliar language, for words may be found more quickly, and they present the words and their meanings in a concentrated and compact form, instead of being scattered over a large space, and separated by other matter. Dictionaries of several languages, called polyglots, are of different kinds. Some are polyglot in the vocabulary, but not in the explanation, like Johnson’s dictionary of Persian and Arabic explained in English ”

“ The historical method of exposition, particularly by quotations, is applied in the New English Dictionary, if not in all cases with entire success, yet, on the whole, with a regularity and a precision which leave little to be desired. A minor fault is that excerpts from second or third rate authors have occasionally been used where better ones from writers of the first class either must have been at hand or could have been found. As was said above, the literary quality of the question is highly important even in historical lexicography, and should not be neglected unnecessarily. ”

“ It is hardly necessary to add that the negative evidence furnished by quotations is generally of little value; one can seldom, that is, be certain that the lexicographer has actually found the earliest or the latest use, or that the word or sense has not been current during some intermediate period from which he has no quotations.
Lastly, a much more important place in the scheme of the ideal dictionary is now assigned to the etymology of words. This may be attributed, in part, to the recent rapid development of etymology as a science, and to the greater abundance of trustworthy data ”

“ His dictionary, the first edition of which, in two folio volumes, appeared in 1755, was in many respects admirable, but it was inadequate even as a standard of the then existing literary usage. Johnson himself did not long entertain the belief that the natural development of a language can be arrested in that or in any other way. His work was, however, generally accepted as a final authority, and the ideas upon which it was founded dominated English lexicography for more than a century. ”

“ It should be added that even approximate conformity to the theoretical requirements of modern lexicography as above outlined is possible only under conditions similar to those under which the Oxford New English Dictionary was undertaken (see below) . The labour demanded is too vast, and the necessary bulk of the dictionary too great. When, however, a language is recorded in one such dictionary, those of smaller size and more modest pretensions can rest upon it as an authority and conform to it as a model so far as their special limitations permit. ”

“ Still less do they attempt to give data from which the vocabulary of the language at any previous period may be determined. The philologist, however, for whom the growth, or progressive alteration, of a language is a fact of central importance, regards no record of a language as complete which does not exhibit this growth in its successive stages. He desires to know when and where each word, and each form and sense of it, are first found in the language; if the word or sense is obsolete, when it died ”

“ The definitions as a whole are marked by a high degree of accuracy, though in a certain number of cases (not explicable by the date of the volumes) the lists of meanings are not so good as one would expect, as compared (say) with the Century Dictionary. Work of such magnitude and quality is possible, practically, only when the editor of the dictionary can command not merely the aid of a very large number of scholars and men of science, but their gratuitous aid. In this the New English Dictionary has been singularly fortunate. ”

“ Olivier justifies them by saying that for eighty years all the best writers belonged to their body, and they could not be expected to cite each other. Their design was to raise the language to its last perfection, and to open a road to reach the highest eloquence. Antoine Furetière, one of their members, compiled a dictionary which he says cost him forty years’ labour for ten hours a day, and the manuscript filled fifteen chests. He gave words of all kinds, especially technical, names of persons and places, and phrases. As a specimen, he published his Essai, Paris, 1684, 4to; Amst. 1685, 12mo. ”

“ The chief difficulty in the way of this use of quotations—after the difficulty of collection—is that of finding space for them in a dictionary of reasonable size. Preference must be given to those which are essential, the number of those which are cited merely on methodical grounds being made as small as possible. ”

“ Bibliography.—The following list of dictionaries (from the 9th edition of this work, with occasional corrections) is given for its historical interest, but in recent years dictionary-making has been so abundant that no attempt is made to be completely inclusive of later works; the various articles on languages may be consulted for these. The list is arranged geographically by families of languages, or by regions. In each group the order, when not alphabetical, is usually from north to south, extinct languages generally coming first, and dialects being placed under their language. ”

“ La Crusca from the great Italian dictionary, and Calepino (in Spanish and Italian) from the Latin dictionary of Calepinus.
The tendency of great dictionaries is to unite in themselves all the peculiar features of special dictionaries. A large dictionary is most useful when a word is to be thoroughly studied, or when there is difficulty in making out the meaning of a word or phrase. Special dictionaries are more useful for special purposes; for instance, synonyms are best studied in a dictionary of synonyms. ”

“ The books, pamphlets, journals, newspapers, and so on which must thus be searched will be numbered by thousands, and the quotations selected may (as in the case of the Oxford New English Dictionary) be counted by millions. This task is beyond the powers of any one man, even though he be a Johnson, or a Littré or a Grimm, and it is now assigned to a corps of readers whose number is limited only by the ability of the editor to obtain such assistance. ”

“ The languages to be considered are too many for an alphabetical arrangement, which ignores all relations both natural and geographical, and too few to require a strict classification by affinities, by which the European languages, which for many reasons should be kept together, would be dispersed. ”

“ For example, the number of obsolete and dialectal words included may be much diminished and the number of scientific terms (for instance, new Latin botanical and zoological names) be increased; and the relative amount of space devoted to etymologies and quotations may be lessened. In general, since books of this kind are designed to serve more or less as works of general reference, the making of them must be governed by considerations of practical utility which the compilers of a purely philological dictionary are not obliged to regard. ”

“ Dictionaries of the older type, therefore, usually make the common, or “proper” or “root” meaning of a word the starting point of its definition, and arrange its other senses in a logical or accidental order commonly ignoring the historical order in which the various meanings arose. ”

“ DICTIONARY. In its proper and most usual meaning a dictionary is a book containing a collection of the words of a language, dialect or subject, arranged alphabetically or in some other definite order, and with explanations in the same or some other language. When the words are few in Definition and
history. number, being only a small part of those belonging to the subject, or when they are given without explanation, or some only are explained, or the explanations are partial, the work is called a vocabulary ”

“ Wörterbuch, a book of words, was first used among the Germans, according to Grimm, by Kramer (1719) , imitated from the Dutch woordenboek. From the Germans the Swedes and Danes adopted ordbok, ordbog. The Icelandic ordabôk, like the German, contains the genitive plural. The Slavonic nations use slovar, slovnik, and the southern Slavs ryetshnik, from slovo, ryetsh, a word, formed, like dictionary and lexicon, without composition. Many other names have been given to dictionaries, as thesaurus, Sprachschatz, cornucopia, gazophylacium, comprehensorium, catholicon, to indicate their completeness ”

“ Ammonius, professor of grammar at Alexandria, and priest of the Egyptian ape, fled to Constantinople with Helladius, and wrote a dictionary of words similar in sound but different in meaning, which has been often printed in Greek lexicons, as Aldus, 1497, Stephanus, and separately by Valckenaer, Lugd. Bat. 1739, 4to, 2 vols., and by others. Zenodotus wrote on the cries of animals, printed in Valckenaer’s Ammonius; with this may be compared the work of Vincentio Caralucci, Lexicon vocum quae a brutis animalibus emittuntur, Perusia, 1779, 12mo. ”

“ Pauthier’s Annamese Dictionary is polyglot in a peculiar way. It gives the Chinese characters with their pronunciation in Chinese and Annamese. Special dictionaries are of many kinds. There are technical dictionaries of etymology, foreign words, dialects, secret languages, slang, neology, barbarous words, faults of expression, choice words, prosody, pronunciation, spelling, orators, poets, law, music, proper names, particular authors, nouns, verbs, participles, particles, double forms, difficulties and many others. Fick’s dictionary (Göttingen, 1868, 8vo; 1874–1876, 8vo, 4 vols.) ”

“ Aristophanes of Byzantium, son of Apelles the painter, who lived in the reigns of Ptolemy II. and Ptolemy III., and had the supreme management of the Alexandrian library, wrote a number of works, as Άττικαί Λέξεις, Λακωνικαί Γλῶσσαι which, from the titles, should be dictionaries, but a fragment of his Λέξεις printed by Boissonade, in his edition of Herodian (London, 1869, 8vo, pp. 181–189) , is not alphabetical. Artemidorus, a pupil of Aristophanes, wrote a dictionary of technical terms used in cookery. ”

“ Helladius a priest of Jupiter at Alexandria, when the heathen temples there were destroyed by Theophilus in 389 or 391 escaped to Constantinople, where he was living in 408. He wrote an alphabetical lexicon, now lost, chiefly of prose, called by Photius the largest (πολυστιχώτατον) which he knew. ”

“ Greek, Latin, French, Romance, Teutonic (Scandinavian and German) , Celtic, Basque, Baltic, Slavonic, Ugrian, Gipsy, Albanian.
Asia: Semitic, Armenian, Persian, Sanskrit, Indian, Indo-Chinese, Malay Archipelago, Philippines, Chinese, Japanese, Northern and Central Asia.
Africa: Egypt and Abyssinia, Eastern Africa, Southern, Western, Central, Berber.
Australia and Polynesia.
America: North, Central (with Mexico) , South.
EUROPE
Greek.—Athenaeus quotes 35 writers of works, known or supposed to be dictionaries, for, as they are all lost, it is often difficult to decide on their nature. ”

“ It is of the greatest value for the knowledge both of language and of antiquities. First printed by Aldus, Venice, 1500, fol.; often afterwards; ed. Lederlinus and Hemsterhuis, Amst. 1706, 2 vols.; Dindorf, 1824, 5 vols., Bethe (1900 f.) . Harpocration of Alexandria, probably of the 2nd century, wrote a lexicon on the ten Attic orators, first printed by Aldus, Ven. 1503, fol.; ed. Dindorf, Oxford, 1853, 8vo, 2 vols. from 14 MSS. Orion, a grammarian of Thebes, in Egypt, who lived between 390 and 460, wrote an etymological dictionary, printed by Sturz, Leipzig, 1820, 4to. ”