A Dictionary of the English Language

“ And though, perhaps, to correct the language of nations by books of grammar, and amend their manners by discourses of morality, may be tasks equally difficult; yet as it is unavoidable to wish, it is natural likewise to hope, that your Lordship's patronage may not be wholly lost; that it may contribute to the preservation of antient, and the improvement of modern writers; that it may promote the reformation of those translators, who for want of understanding the characteristical difference of tongues, have formed a chaotic dialect of heterogeneous phrases ”

“ To boldly declare in favor of any one dictionary at the present day, would be as bold, and we may add as untimely and illogical a proceeding as to endorse any one grammar, when nothing can be clearer to the student of language than that our English tongue is more unfixed and undergoing changes more rapidly than any other which boasts a truly great literature. ”

“ A foreign language rouses our attention, and all the more in proportion to its strangeness. The modern tongues are modern and in part already ours; Greek and Latin, by their strangeness, more pervadingly quicken the attention.
And what becomes of the finger in the dictionary—a very different thing from a glance into a glossarial index—if our language study be English? Conceding that the same diligent attention might gain as good results from the English dictionary, how are we to drive students to give it such use? Driven they must be, for they think they know already. ”

“ The plain man or gentlewoman may write a letter in his or her natural language, and then by turning up the simple words in the dictionary alter them into their learned equivalents. Thus ‘abound’ may be altered into exuperate, ‘too great plenty’ into uberty, ‘he and I are of one age’ into we are coetaneous, ‘youthful babbling’ into juvenile inaniloquence—a useful expression to hurl at an opponent in the Oxford Union. ”

“ Though art may sometimes prolong their duration, it will rarely give them perpetuity, and their changes will be almost always informing us, that language is the work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be derived.
Words having been hitherto considered as separate and unconnected, are now to be likewise examined as they are ranged in their Various relations to others by the rules of SYNTAX or construction, to which I do not know that any regard has been yet shewn in English dictionaries, and in which the grammarians give little assistance. ”

“ We find them, in their speculations, conspiring to represent primeval man, to use their own words, as a "savage, whose 'howl at the appearance of danger, and whose exclamations of joy at the sight of his prey, reiterated, or varied with the change of objects, were probably the origin of language.'—Booth's Analytical Dictionary. ”

“ But it may be reasonably imagined, that what is so much in the power of men as language, will very often be capriciously conducted. Nor are these disquisitions and conjectures to be considered altogether as wanton sports of wit, or vain shews of learning; our language is well known not to be Primitive or self-originated, but to have adopted words of every generation, and either for the supply of its necessities, or the encrease of its copiousness, to have received additions from very distant regions ”

“ Dual Character of our LanguageIt is this old vigorous Anglo-Saxon language which forms the basis of our modern English. If we read a paragraph from any good English book, and then analyze it, as we would a flower, to see what it contains, we find two distinct classes of words. The first class, containing simple words expressing the common things of life, makes up the strong framework of our language. These words are like the stem and bare branches of a mighty oak, and if we look them up in the dictionary we find that almost invariably they come to us from our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. ”

“ who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand; ”

“ It was obvious, of course, that a very great deal would have to be done to bring up to date a dictionary of a living language that is ever growing, and in which new words and new meanings of words are being coined almost daily. ”

“ The English vocabulary offers a fruitful field of study. First of all, the cast of thought that it expresses is individual. Ours is a distinct, not necessarily superior, civilization; and all the forms of intellectual activity represented by our tongue are so characteristic that one may well believe in the formative influence of a language over the people speaking it. ”

“ yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow. ”

“ The attention which has lately been given to the culture of the English language, by some who, in the character of critics or lexicographers, have laboured purposely to improve it, and by many others who, in various branches of knowledge, have tastefully adorned it with the works of their genius, has in a great measure redeemed it from that contempt in which it was formerly held in the halls of learning. ”

“ LOSS AND GAIN.—But, while the English language has, in the course of centuries, lost almost all its inflections, it has been all that time gaining new words, and at the same time gaining new powers of expression. In fact, the history of our language is a history of both loss and gain. ”

“ The English language has properly no dialects; the style of writers has no professed diversity in the use of words, or of their flexions and terminations, nor differs but by different degrees of skill or care. ”

“ The verbal nouns in ing, such as the keeping of the castle, the leading of the army, are always neglected, or placed only to illustrate the sense of the verb, except when they signify things as well as actions, and have therefore a plural number, as dwelling, living; or have an absolute and abstract signification, as colouring, painting, learning.
The participles are likewise omitted, unless, by signifying rather habit or quality than action, they take the nature of adjectives; as a thinking man, a man of prudence ”

“ Music, Natural History, Navigation, Optics, Painting, Perspective, Philosophy, Pneumatics, Poetry, Rhetoric, Sculpture, Surveying, etc. but II. A Pronouncing Dictionary; in Which the Proper Sounds of English Words Are Given in a Manner So Plain and Simple, That Both Natives and Foreigners May Correct an Improper, or Acquire a Right Pronunciation of the English Language. ”

“ ENGLISH WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.—The English language has for centuries been importing words from many foreign tongues into its own vocabulary; and it has given a hearty welcome to all kinds of strangers. ”

“ In English alone, in a language which possesses a body of poetical literature more extensive, as well as more valuable than any other modern language, not excepting the Italian, the student has no rules to guide him, but a few meagre and incorrect outlines appended to elementary text-books. ”

“ I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to I forget that WORDS ARE THE DAUGHTERS OF EARTH, AND THAT THINGS ARE THE SONS OF HEAVEN. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote. ”

“ Modern English is, as we know, a magnificent composite, possessing the richest, most varied, most expressive vocabulary imaginable. As fully heir of the polished classical tongues through the Norman French as of the homely and rugged Teutonic stocks through the Saxon, our English language certainly offers us a wealth of words without compare among the civilized tongues of to-day. Add to this a minimum of grammar, an absolute simplicity, flexibility and mobility of structure, and why should English be other than the best possible international form of speech? ”

“ The dictionaries of modern English are said to contain about 38,000 words, of which about 23,000 or five eighths of the whole number, come from the Anglo-Saxon.
The English language, by its remarkable combination of strength, precision, and copiousness, is worthy of being, as it already is, spoken by many millions, and these the part of the human race that appear likely to control, more than any others, the future destinies of the world. ”

“ Under the influence of this change, our own language is rising into an importance which it could never attain so long as it was regarded simply as a vulgar tongue, and the historical study of English is becoming one of the most popular as well as one of the most useful pursuits of our philologists. ”

“ So far have I been from any care to grace my pages with modern decorations, that I have studiously endeavoured to collect examples and authorities from the writers before the restoration, whose works I regard as the wells of English undefiled, as the pure sources of genuine diction. ”

“ For magnificence, for pathos, for vehement exhortation, for subtle disquisition, for every purpose of the poet, the orator, and the divine, this homely dialect—the dialect of plain working men—was perfectly sufficient. There is no book in our literature on which we would so readily stake the fame of the old unpolluted English language—no book which shows so well how rich that language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been improved by all that it has borrowed. ”

“ This study, when properly conducted and liberally pursued, has an obvious tendency to dignify the whole character. How can he be a man of refined literary taste, who cannot speak and write his native language grammatically? ”

“ the word, how often soever repeated, appears with new associates and in different combinations, and every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language. ”

“ During the years in which I have sat in this seat of honour, the two great national undertakings of the 'New English Dictionary' and the 'Dictionary of National Biography,' now rapidly approaching completion, have made their public appearance, together with that other and hardly less important work 'The Dialect Dictionary.' With these I am proud to find Notes and Queries closely connected. Association with them has added greatly to its claims to recognition. ”

“ Without referring invidiously to cultivated foreign languages, each of which has many such monuments of elaborate, accurate, and patient research, it may be said with confidence that the English language is unrivaled in its lexicographers, who at the close of the nineteenth century have completed works which only a few decades ago were not thought of as possible. ”

“ The learner is supposed to be unacquainted with all but his own native [xii] tongue; and in what other, consistently with reason and common sense, would you go about to explain it to him? When he has a competent knowledge of the main principles, the common terms, the general rules, the whole subject and business of Grammar, exemplified in his own Language; he then will apply himself with great advantage to any foreign language, whether ancient or modern. ”

“ THE GRAMMAR OF ENGLISH GRAMMARS. Grammar, as an art, is the power of reading, writing, and speaking correctly. As an acquisition, it is the essential skill of scholarship. As a study, it is the practical science which teaches the right use of language.
An English Grammar is a book which professes to explain the nature and structure of the English language ”

“ OBS. 6.—Well-educated people commonly utter their words with more distinctness and fullness than the vulgar, yet without adopting ordinarily the long-drawn syllables of poets and orators, or the solemn phraseology of preachers and prophets. Whatever may be thought of the grammatical propriety of such contractions as the foregoing, no one who has ever observed how the English language is usually spoken, will doubt their commonness, or their antiquity. And it may be observed, that, in the use of these forms, the distinction of persons and numbers in the verb, is almost, if not entirely, dropped. ”

“ Verbs:—
-ize (-ise) , do, make or cause to be: baptize, criticise, dogmatize, Hellenize, ostracize, proselytize, theorize. It is often attached to stems not derived from Greek: anglicize, authorize, Judaize, botanize, fertilize, naturalize, pulverize, scrutinize, terrorize.
ENGLISH ROOT-WORDS AND DERIVATIVES.
The native force of English was such that it came to be a highly developed language, possessing a copious vocabulary and a rich literature in prose and verse. ”

“ The influences at work upon the English language at present are very complex, and play on it with great force, so that the changes are startling in their rapidity. English is not only the language of a nation or of a race, not even of an empire ”

“ From what has been said it should be plain that the localization of a piece of Middle English on the evidence of language alone calls for an investigation of scope and delicacy. Where the facts are so complex the mechanical application of rules of thumb may give quick and specious results, but must in the end deaden the spirit of inquiry, which is the best gift a student can bring to the subject.
§ 3. VOCABULARY. The readiness of English speakers to adopt words from foreign languages becomes marked in fourteenth-century writings. ”