John Considine

An overview of dictionaries of English as primary and secondary sources for the history of the English language, with notes on what can be learned from the study of early dictionaries, and on the development, present state, and possible future of scholarly historical lexicography in English.

This paper examines six guides to the etymology of English, written for nonspecialist readers between 1887 and 2009. Four are by etymological lexicographers (two by W. W. Skeat and one each by Anatoly Liberman and Philip Durkin) and two by philologists with strong etymological interests (A. S. C. Ross and W. B. Lockwood). The paper seeks to present their contents, to compare them with each other, and to contextualize them both in the internal history and in the social history of scholarship.

The aim of this paper is to rescue the reputation of the much-maligned seventeenth-century English lexicographer Edward Phillips. He has been accused of plagiarizing in his dictionary called New world of English words (1658) from an earlier dictionary, Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1656), and he has been accused of claiming misleadingly that his dictionary was enriched by the contributions of consultants. Both accusations were originally made by Blount. Examining them both – which requires the use of techniques from the history of the book and the social history of science and technology – leads to the conclusion that neither accusation is true, and that Phillips actually made multiple original contributions to the development of the English lexicographical tradition, particularly in the use of consultants and the handling of technological vocabulary.

This is a note to support and expand recent work on the etymology of German Meerschweinchen, English guinea pig, and related forms with a body of dated evidence, including new first attestations for English guinea pig and Polish świnka morska.