• DOI:10.1353/DIC.2002.0004
• Corpus ID: 162931774

The Revolution of English Lexicography

@article{Simpson2002TheRO,
  title={The Revolution of English Lexicography},
  author={J. A. Simpson},
  journal={Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America},
  year={2002},
  volume={23},
  pages={1 - 15}
}

• J. Simpson
• Published 4 April 2012
• Linguistics, History
• Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America

ine hundred years ago, on 22 June 1900, the Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), James Murray, made his way to the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford to deliver the annual Romanes Lecture. His subject was The Evolution ofEnglish Lexicography, and he was giving the lecture at a time when, after sixteen years, publication of the OED had reached the letter/. During his talk, he reviewed the progress of English lexicography since the earliest Anglo-Saxon glossaries. He detailed the emergence of the first monolingual English dictionaries in the early seventeenth century and went on to examine the work of Bailey, Johnson, Webster, and the OED. That was an exciting time in the world of lexicography. The OED was well established as the premiere historical record of the vocabulary of English; the Grimms' Deutsches Wörterbuch (1852-1960) was making steady progress in Germany; the great Dutch dictionary, the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (de Vries, te Winkel, and others [1882-1998]), had been publishing relentlessly over the previous twenty years; Littré's Dictionnaire de la Langue Française (1863-1872) was finished; and many other major lexical texts were either in progress or had been completed throughout the academic world. Murray concentrated in his lecture on English lexicography and suggested that the historical method had reached a climax with his OED. He wrote carefully and painstakingly about the achievement, as the lecture drew to an end: