The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester Page A
Authors: Simon Winchester
Tags: United States, General, Biography & Autobiography, Biography, Psychiatric Hospital Patients, Great Britain, History and Criticism, Encyclopedias and Dictionaries, English Language, English Language - Etymology, Encyclopedias and Dictionaries - History and Criticism, United States - History - Civil War; 1861-1865 - Veterans, Lexicographers - Great Britain, Minor; William Chester, Murray; James Augustus Henry - Friends and Associates, Lexicographers, English Language - Lexicography, Psychiatric Hospital Patients - Great Britain, New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Oxford English Dictionary
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remark on the apparent lack as well. In the very same year as Shakespeare’s death, his friend John Webster wrote his The Duchess of Malfi , incorporating a scene in which the duchess’s brother Ferdinand imagines that he is turning into a wolf, “a pestilent disease they call licanthropia.” “What is that?” cries one of the cast. “I need a dictionary to’t!”
But in fact someone, a Rutland schoolmaster named Robert Cawdrey, who later moved to teach in Coventry, had evidently been listening to this drumbeat of demand. He read and took copious notes from all the reference books of the day and eventually produced his first halfhearted attempt at what was wanted by publishing such a list in 1604 (the year Shakespeare probably wrote Measure for Measure ).
It was a small octavo book of 120 pages, which Cawdrey titled A Table Alphabeticall…of hard unusual English Words . It had about 2,500 word entries. He had compiled it, he said, “for the benefit & help of Ladies, gentlewomen or any other unskilful persons, Whereby they may more easilie and better vnderstand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in the Scriptures, Sermons or elsewhere, and also be made able to vse the same aptly themselues.” It had many shortcomings; but it was without doubt the very first true monolingual English dictionary, and its publication remains a pivotal moment in the history of English lexicography.
For the next century and a half there was a great flurry of commercial activity in the field, and dictionary after dictionary thundered off the presses, each one larger than the next, each boasting of superior value in the educating of the uneducated (among whom were counted the women of the day, most of whom enjoyed little schooling, compared to the men).
Throughout the seventeenth century these books tended to concentrate, as Cawdrey’s first offering had, on what were called “hard words”—words that were not in common, everyday use, or else words that had been invented specifically to impress others, the so-called “inkhorn terms” with which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books seem well larded. Thomas Wilson, whose Arte of Rhetorique had helped Shakespeare, published examples of the high-flown style, such as that from a clergyman in Lincolnshire writing to a government official, begging a promotion:
There is a Sacerdotall dignitie in my native Countrey contiguate to me, where I now contemplate: which your worshipfull benignitie could sone impenetrate for mee, if it would like you to extend your sedules, and collaude me in them to the right honourable lord Chaunceller, or rather Archgrammacian of Englande.
The fact that the volumes concentrated on only the small section of the national vocabulary that encompassed such nonsense might seem today to render them bizarrely incomplete, but back then their editorial selection was regarded as a virtue. Speaking and writing thus was the highest ambition of the English smart set. “We present for you,” trumpeted the editor of one such volume to would-be members, “the choicest words.”
So, fantastic linguistic creations like abequitate, bulbulcitate , and sullevation appeared in these books alongside archgrammacian and contiguate , with lengthy definitions; there were words like necessitude, commotrix , and parentate —all of which are now listed, if listed at all, as “obsolete” or “rare” or both. Pretentious and flowery inventions adorned the language—perhaps not all that surprising, considering the flowery fashion of the times, with its perukes and powdered periwigs; its rebatos and doublets; its ruffs, ribbons; and scarlet velvet Rhinegraves. So words like adminiculation, cautionate, deruncinate , and attemptate are placed in the vocabulary too, each duly cataloged in the tiny leather books of the day; yet they were words meant only for the loftiest ears, and were unlikely to impress Cawdrey’s intended audience of ladies, gentlewomen, and
But in fact someone, a Rutland schoolmaster named Robert Cawdrey, who later moved to teach in Coventry, had evidently been listening to this drumbeat of demand. He read and took copious notes from all the reference books of the day and eventually produced his first halfhearted attempt at what was wanted by publishing such a list in 1604 (the year Shakespeare probably wrote Measure for Measure ).
It was a small octavo book of 120 pages, which Cawdrey titled A Table Alphabeticall…of hard unusual English Words . It had about 2,500 word entries. He had compiled it, he said, “for the benefit & help of Ladies, gentlewomen or any other unskilful persons, Whereby they may more easilie and better vnderstand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in the Scriptures, Sermons or elsewhere, and also be made able to vse the same aptly themselues.” It had many shortcomings; but it was without doubt the very first true monolingual English dictionary, and its publication remains a pivotal moment in the history of English lexicography.
For the next century and a half there was a great flurry of commercial activity in the field, and dictionary after dictionary thundered off the presses, each one larger than the next, each boasting of superior value in the educating of the uneducated (among whom were counted the women of the day, most of whom enjoyed little schooling, compared to the men).
Throughout the seventeenth century these books tended to concentrate, as Cawdrey’s first offering had, on what were called “hard words”—words that were not in common, everyday use, or else words that had been invented specifically to impress others, the so-called “inkhorn terms” with which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books seem well larded. Thomas Wilson, whose Arte of Rhetorique had helped Shakespeare, published examples of the high-flown style, such as that from a clergyman in Lincolnshire writing to a government official, begging a promotion:
There is a Sacerdotall dignitie in my native Countrey contiguate to me, where I now contemplate: which your worshipfull benignitie could sone impenetrate for mee, if it would like you to extend your sedules, and collaude me in them to the right honourable lord Chaunceller, or rather Archgrammacian of Englande.
The fact that the volumes concentrated on only the small section of the national vocabulary that encompassed such nonsense might seem today to render them bizarrely incomplete, but back then their editorial selection was regarded as a virtue. Speaking and writing thus was the highest ambition of the English smart set. “We present for you,” trumpeted the editor of one such volume to would-be members, “the choicest words.”
So, fantastic linguistic creations like abequitate, bulbulcitate , and sullevation appeared in these books alongside archgrammacian and contiguate , with lengthy definitions; there were words like necessitude, commotrix , and parentate —all of which are now listed, if listed at all, as “obsolete” or “rare” or both. Pretentious and flowery inventions adorned the language—perhaps not all that surprising, considering the flowery fashion of the times, with its perukes and powdered periwigs; its rebatos and doublets; its ruffs, ribbons; and scarlet velvet Rhinegraves. So words like adminiculation, cautionate, deruncinate , and attemptate are placed in the vocabulary too, each duly cataloged in the tiny leather books of the day; yet they were words meant only for the loftiest ears, and were unlikely to impress Cawdrey’s intended audience of ladies, gentlewomen, and
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