The historical method of exposition, particularly by quotations, is applied in the New English Dictionary, if not in all cases with entire success, yet, on the whole, with a regularity and a precision which leave little to be desired. A minor fault is that excerpts from second or third rate authors have occasionally been used where better ones from writers of the first class either must have been at hand or could have been found. As was said above, the literary quality of the question is highly important even in historical lexicography, and should not be neglected unnecessarily. Other special features of the book are the completeness with which variations of pronunciation and orthography (with dates) are given; the fulness and scientific excellence of the etymologies, which abound in new information and corrections of old errors; the phonetic precision with which the present (British) pronunciation is indicated; and the elaborate subdivision of meanings. The definitions as a whole are marked by a high degree of accuracy, though in a certain number of cases (not explicable by the date of the volumes) the lists of meanings are not so good as one would expect, as compared (say) with the Century Dictionary. Work of such magnitude and quality is possible, practically, only when the editor of the dictionary can command not merely the aid of a very large number of scholars and men of science, but their gratuitous aid. In this the New English Dictionary has been singularly fortunate. The conditions under which it originated, and its aim, have interested scholars everywhere, and led them to contribute to the perfecting of it their knowledge and time. The long list of names of such helpers in Sir J. A. H. Murray’s preface is in curious contrast with their absence from Dr Johnson’s and the few which are given in that of Littré. The editor’s principal assistants were Dr Henry Bradley and Dr W. A. Craigie. Of the dictionary as a whole it may be said that it is one of the greatest achievements, whether in literature or science, of modern English scholarship and research.
The New English Dictionary furnishes for the first time data from which the extent of the English word-store at any given period, and the direction and rapidity of its growth, can fairly be estimated. For this purpose the materials furnished by the older dictionaries are quite insufficient, on account of their incompleteness and unhistorical character. For example 100 pages of the New English Dictionary (from the letter H) contain 1002 words, of which, as the dated quotations show, 585 were current in 1750 (though some, of course, were very rare, some dialectal, and so on), 191 were obsolete at that date, and 226 have since come into use. But of the more than 700 words—current or obsolete—which Johnson might thus have recorded, he actually did record only about 300. Later dictionaries give more of them, but they in no way show their status at the date in question. It is worth noting that the figures given seem to indicate that not very many more words have been added to the vocabulary of the language during the past 150 years than had been lost by 1750. The pages selected, however, contain comparatively few recent scientific terms. A broader comparison would probably show that the gain has been more than twice as great as the loss.
In the Deutsches Wörterbuch of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm the scientific spirit, as was said above, first found expression in general lexicography. The desirability of a complete inventory and investigation of German words was recognized by Leibnitz and by various 18th-century scholars, but the plan and methods of the Grimms were the direct product of the then new scientific philology. Their design, in brief, was to give an exhaustive account of the words of the literary language (New High German) from about the end of the 15th century, including their earlier etymological and later history, with references to important dialectal words and forms; and to illustrate their use and history abundantly by quotations. The first volume appeared in 1854. Jacob Grimm (died 1863) edited the first, second (with his brother, who died in 1859), third and a part of the fourth volumes; the others have been edited by various distinguished scholars. The scope and methods of this dictionary have been broadened somewhat as the work has advanced. In general it may be said that it differs from the New English Dictionary chiefly in its omission of pronunciations and other pedagogic matter; its irregular treatment of dates; its much less systematic and less lucid statement of etymologies; its less systematic and less fruitful use of quotations; and its less convenient and less intelligible arrangement of material and typography.
These general principles lie also at the foundation of the scholarly Dictionnaire de la langue française of E. Littré, though they are there carried out less systematically and less completely. In the arrangement of the definitions the first place is given to the most primitive meaning of the word instead of to the most common one, as in the dictionary of the Academy; but the other meanings follow in an order that is often logical rather than historical. Quotations also are frequently used merely as literary illustrations, or are entirely omitted; in the special paragraphs on the history of words before the 16th century, however, they are put to a strictly historical use. This dictionary—perhaps the greatest ever compiled by one man—was published 1863-1872. (Supplement, 1878.)
The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, prepared under the auspices of the German Academies of Berlin, Göttingen, Leipzig, Munich and Vienna, is a notable application of the principles and practical co-operative method of modern lexicography to the classical tongues. The plan of the work is to collect quotations which shall register, with its full context, every word (except the most familiar particles) in the text of each Latin author down to the middle of the 2nd century a.d., and to extract all important passages from all writers of the following centuries down to the 7th; and upon these materials to found a complete historical dictionary of the Latin language. The work of collecting quotations was begun in 1894, and the first part of the first volume has been published.
In the making of all these great dictionaries (except, of course, the last) the needs of the general public as well as those of scholars have been kept in view. But the type to which the general dictionary designed for popular use has tended more and more to conform is the encyclopaedic. This combination of lexicon and encyclopaedia is exhibited in an extreme—and theoretically objectionable—form in the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle of Pierre Larousse. Besides common words and their definitions, it contains a great many proper names, with a correspondingly large number of biographical, geographical, historical and other articles, the connexion of which with the strictly lexicographical part is purely mechanical. Its utility, which—notwithstanding its many defects—is very great, makes it, however, a model in many respects. Fifteen volumes were published (1866-1876), and supplements were brought out later (1878-1890). The Nouveau Larousse illustré started publication in 1901, and was completed in 1904 (7 vols.). This is not an abridgment or a fresh edition of the Grand Dictionnaire of Pierre Larousse, but a new and distinct publication.
The most notable work of this class, in English, is the Century Dictionary, an American product, edited by Professor W. D. Whitney, and published 1889-1891 in six volumes, containing 7046 pages (large quarto). It conforms to the philological mode in giving with great fulness the older as well as the present vocabulary of the language, and in the completeness of its etymologies; but it does not attempt to give the full history of every word within the language. Among its other more noteworthy characteristics are the inclusion of a great number of modern scientific and technical words, and the abundance of its quotations. The quotations are for the most part provided with references, but they are not dated. Even when compared with the much larger New English Dictionary, the Century’s great merit is the excellent enumeration of meanings, and the accuracy of its explanations; in this respect it is often better and fuller than the New English. In the application of the encyclopaedic method this dictionary is conservative, excluding, with a few exceptions, proper names, and restricting, for the most part, the encyclopaedic matter to descriptive and other details which may legitimately be added to the definitions. Its pictorial illustrations are very numerous and well executed. In the manner of its compilation it is a good example of modern cooperative dictionary-making, being the joint product of a large number of specialists. Next to the New English Dictionary it is the most complete and scholarly of English lexicons.
Bibliography.—The following list of dictionaries (from the 9th edition of this work, with occasional corrections) is given for its historical interest, but in recent years dictionary-making has been so abundant that no attempt is made to be completely inclusive of later works; the various articles on languages may be consulted for these. The list is arranged geographically by families of languages, or by regions. In each group the order, when not alphabetical, is usually from north to south, extinct languages generally coming first, and dialects being placed under their language. Dictionaries forming parts of other works, such as travels, histories, transactions, periodicals, reading-books, &c., are generally excluded. The system here adopted was chosen as on the whole the one best calculated to keep together dictionaries naturally associated. The languages to be considered are too many for an alphabetical arrangement, which ignores all relations both natural and geographical, and too few to require a strict classification by affinities, by which the European languages, which for many reasons should be kept together, would be dispersed. Under either system, Arabic, Persian and Turkish, whose dictionaries are so closely connected, would be widely separated. A wholly geographical arrangement would be inconvenient, especially in Europe. Any system, however, which attempts to arrange in a consecutive series the great network of languages by which the whole world is enclosed, must be open to some objections; and the arrangement adopted in this list has produced some anomalies and dispersions which might cause inconvenience if not pointed out. The old Italic languages are placed under Latin, all dialects of France under French (but Provençal as a distinct language), and Wallachian among Romanic languages. Low German and its dialects are not separated from High German. Basque is placed after Celtic; Albanian, Gipsy and Turkish at the end of Europe, the last being thus separated from its dialects and congeners in Northern and Central Asia, among which are placed the Kazan dialect of Tatar, Samoyed and Ostiak. Accadian is placed after Assyrian among the Semitic languages, and Maltese as a dialect of Arabic; while the Ethiopic is among African languages as it seemed undesirable to separate it from the other Abyssinian languages, or these from their neighbours to the north and south. Circassian and Ossetic are joined to the first group of Aryan languages lying to the north-west of Persia, and containing Armenian, Georgian and Kurd. The following is the order of the groups, some of the more important languages, that is, of those best provided with dictionaries, standing alone:—
Europe: Greek, Latin, French, Romance, Teutonic (Scandinavian and German), Celtic, Basque, Baltic, Slavonic, Ugrian, Gipsy, Albanian.
Asia: Semitic, Armenian, Persian, Sanskrit, Indian, Indo-Chinese, Malay Archipelago, Philippines, Chinese, Japanese, Northern and Central Asia.