IngentaConnect Johnson and Seventeenth-Century English Glossographers

Author: Lancashire, Ian

Source: International Journal of Lexicography, Volume 18, Number 2, 1 June 2005 , pp. 157-171(15)

Abstract:

This paper considers the hidden sources within dictionaries by Thomas Blount, Edward Phillips, Elisha Coles, and John Kersey from 1656 to 1706, and their impact on Samuel Johnson's Dictionary. It takes Johnson's adaptation of word-entries in law lexicons by John Cowell and Blount, and demonstrates their different views of illustrative quotations. Through a review of pre-Johnson word-entries within the letter N, a pattern of reliance can be detected: this sometimes takes the form of straight plagiarism and sometimes the form of borrowings from bilingual dictionaries in which the foreign language word becomes the etymology and the English equivalent the definition, with an anglicized version of the foreign language word becoming the ‘hard word’ headword. A comparison of the eighteenth-century compiler of a dictionary of common words, John Kersey, with his seventeenth-century predecessors suggests that Johnson had more in common with Kersey than with any seventeenth-century lexicographer. Both omit sizable numbers of hard words, until then the staple of English lexicons.

Keywords: antiphospholipid syndrome; recurrent miscarriage; thrombosis

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1093/ijl/eci018

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