DICTIONARY 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. The first effective protest, in England, against the supremacy of this literary view was made by Dean (later Archbishop) Trench, in a paper on “Some Deficiencies in Existing English Dictionaries ” read before the Philological Society in °1857. “A dictionary,” he said, “according to that idea of it which seems to me alone capable of being logically maintained, is an inventory of the language; much more, but this primarily. ... It is no task of the maker of it to select the good words of the language. . . . The business which he has undertaken is to collect and arrange all words, whether good or bad, whether they commend themselves to his judgment or otherwise. . . . He is an historian of [the language], not a critic." That is, for the literary view of the chief end of the general dictionary should be substituted the philological or scientific. 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. This theoretical requirement must, of course, be modified considerably in practice. The date at which a modern language is to be regarded by the lexicographer as “beginning ” must, as a rule, be somewhat arbitrarily chosen ; while considerable portions of its earlier vocabulary cannot be recovered because of the incompleteness of the literary record. Moreover, not even the most complete dictionary can include all the words which the records—earlier and later—actually contain. Many words, that is to say, which are found in the literature of a language cannot be regarded as, for lexicographic purposes, belonging to that language; while many more may or may not be held to belong to it, according to the judgment—almost the whim—of the individual lexicographer. This is especially true of the English tongue. “That vast aggregate of words and phrases which constitutes the vocabulary of English-speaking men presents, to the mind that endeavours to grasp it as a definite whole, the aspect of one of those nebulous masses familiar to the astronomer, in which a clear and unmistakable nucleus shades off on all sides, through zones of decreasing brightness, to a dim marginal film that seems to end nowhere, but to lose itself imperceptibly in the surrounding darkness ” (Dr J. A. H. Murray, Oxford Diet., General Explanations, p. xvii). This “ marginal film ” of words with more or less doubtful claims to recognition includes thousands of the terms of the natural sciences (the New-Latin classificatory names of zoology and botany, names of chemical compounds and of minerals, and the like) ; half-naturalized foreign words ; dialectal words ; slang terms ; trade names (many of which have passed or are passing into common use); proper names and many more. Many of these even the most complete dictionary should exclude; others it should include ; but where the line shall be drawn will always remain a vexed question. Another important principle upon which Trench insisted, and which also expresses a requirement of modern scientific
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philology, is that the dictionary shall be not merely a record, but also an historical record of words and their uses. From the literary point of view the most important thing is present usage. To that alone the idea of a “ standard ” has any application. 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. 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; and any other fact that throws light upon its history. He requires, accordingly, of the lexicographer that, having ascertained these data, he shall make them the foundation of his exposition^—in particular, of the division and arrangement of his definitions, that sense being placed first which appeared first in order of time. In other words, each article in the dictionary should furnish an orderly biography of the word of which it treats, each word and sense being so dated that the exact time of its appearance and the duration of its use may as nearly as possible be determined. This, in principle, is the method of the new lexicography. In practice it is subject to limitations similar to those of the vocabulary mentioned above. Incompleteness of the early record is here an even greater obstacle; and there are many words whose history is, for one reason or another, so unimportant that to treat it elaborately would be a waste of labour and space. The adoption of the historical principle involves a further noteworthy modification of older methods, namely, an important extension of the use of quotations. To Dr Johnson belongs the credit of showing how useful, when properly chosen, they may be, not only in corroborating the lexicographer’s statements, but also in revealing special shades of meaning or variations of use which his definitions cannot well express. Ho part of Johnson’s work is more valuable than this. This idea was more fully developed and applied by Dr Charles Kichardson, whose New Dictionary of the English Language . . . Illustrated by Quotations from the Best Authors (1835-86), still remains a most valuable collection of literary illustrations. Lexicographers, however, have, with few exceptions, until a recent date, employed quotations chiefly for the ends just mentioned—as instances of use or as illustrations of correct usage—with scarcely any recognition of their value as historical evidence; and they have taken them almost exclusively from the works of the “best” authors. But since all the data upon which conclusions with regard to the history of a word can be based must be collected from the literature of the language, it is evident that, in so far as the lexicographer is required to furnish evidence for an historical inference, a quotation is the best form in which he can give it. In fact, extracts, properly selected and grouped, are generally sufficient to show the entire meaning and biography of a word without the aid of elaborate definitions. The latter simply save the reader the trouble of drawing the proper conclusions for himself. A further rule of the new lexicography, accordingly, is that quotations should be used, primarily, as historical evidence, and that the history of words and meanings should be exhibited by means of them. The earliest instance of use that can be found, and (if the word or sense is obsolete) the latest, are as a rule to be given; while in the case of an important
