At no time was progress in the making of general dictionaries so rapid as during the second half of the 19th century. It is to be seen in three things: in the perfecting of the theory of what a general dictionary should be; in the elaboration of methods of collecting and editing lexicographic Methods. materials; and in the magnitude and improved quality of the work which has been accomplished or planned. Each of these can best be illustrated from English lexicography, in which the process of development has in all directions been carried farthest. The advance that has been made in theory began with a radical change of opinion with regard to the chief end of the general dictionary of a language. The older view of the matter was that the lexicographer should furnish a standard of usage—should register only those words which are, or at some period of the language have been, “good” from a literary point of view, with their “proper” senses and uses, or should at least furnish the means of determining what these are. In other words, his chief duty was conceived to be to sift and refine, to decide authoritatively questions with regard to good usage, and thus to fix the language as completely as might be possible within the limits determined by the literary taste of his time. Thus the Accademia della Crusca, founded near the close of the 16th century, was established for the purpose of purifying in this way the Italian tongue, and in 1612 the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, long the standard of that language, was published. The Académie Française, the first edition of whose dictionary appeared in 1694, had a similar origin. In England the idea of constructing a dictionary upon this principle arose during the second quarter of the 18th century. It was imagined by men of letters—among them Alexander Pope—that the English language had then attained such perfection that further improvement was hardly possible, and it was feared that if it were not fixed by lexicographic authority deterioration would soon begin. Since there was no English “Academy,” it was necessary that the task should fall to some one whose judgment would command respect, and the man who undertook it was Samuel Johnson. His dictionary, the first edition of which, in two 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 Dict. 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 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. No part of Johnson’s work is more valuable than this. This idea was more fully developed and applied by Dr Charles Richardson, whose New Dictionary of the English Language . . . Illustrated by Quotations from the Best Authors (1835–1836) still remains a most valuable collection of literary illustrations. Lexicographers, however, have, with
