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This book traces the history of loanwords in English from earliest times to the present day. The first two chapters outline the research methodology and framework, and introduce several key datasets that are referred to throughout the book: the full wordlist of the Oxford English Dictionary; the 1,000 most frequent words in a corpus of contemporary English; and the English words that provide the closest fit with a large list of basic meanings. The next three chapters look at the historical and cultural background up to the Norman Conquest, the methodology of comparative linguistics and the identification of families of related languages, the ways in which loanwords from the remote past are identified, and, finally, why there are relatively few English loanwords from the Celtic languages of the British Isles. The following three groups of chapters form the heart of the historical discussion in the book, looking in detail at loanwords from Latin found in Old English; loanwords resulting from Scandinavian contact and settlement; and loanwords that reflect multilingual contacts between French, Latin, and English in later medieval England. The final part of the book looks in detail at loanwords from Latin and French from 1500 to the present, including the role of loanwords in the history of written English and in the formation of specialist technical and scientific vocabularies; the contribution from other major donor languages, both within Europe and beyond (including Arabic, Hebrew, languages of South Asia, Malay, Chinese, Maori, and Japanese); and, finally, it assesses the deep transformations in all layers of the vocabulary of English that have resulted from the integration of loanwords from different sources.

This book introduces the rapidly evolving field of electronic lexicography. The aim is to provide a wide overview of the full process of electronic dictionary production and present some of the challenges faced by publishers, editors and lexicographers as well as the benefits offered to a wide range of users language learners, translators and professionals. Throughout the book particular focus is placed on user needs and the functionalities of electronic dictionaries that are designed to meet them. The volume contains chapters introducing some innovative dictionary projects and surveys of dictionary use. One of the hallmarks of the volume is that it is not limited to English but touches on a range of other languages (Bantu languages, French, German, Russian, Slovene, Spanish as well as sign language). Another key feature of the volume is that it embraces a wide range of lexicographic theories and practices.

Usage guides, or language advice manuals, are being published in large numbers, both in Britain and the US. The first titles that usually spring to mind are Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) or Sir Ernest Gowers’s Complete Plain Words (1954). Yet as a phenomenon, they are much older than that: the first English usage guide was published in 1770, and the first American one in 1847. Today, new titles come out almost every year, while old works are revised and reissued. At the same time, usage advice can be readily found on the internet: Grammar Girl, for instance, is a good example of what is in effect an online usage guide, and there are many others about. Remarkably, however, the kind of usage problems that have been treated over the years are very much the same, and attitudes towards them, by usage guide writers and the general public alike, are slow to change. Remarkably also, usage guides continue to be published despite easy online access to usage advice: there is clearly a market for them, and especially the more controversial ones sell well. How are usage guides compiled and revised? Who writes them? How do they do they differ from, say, grammars and dictionaries? How do attitudes to usage problems change? Why does the BBC need its own style guide, and why are usage guides published to begin with? These are central topics in the book.

From its Germanic roots on the Continent, English has had many influences from other languages. This work documents the main influences on the lexicon and the structure. The earliest contacts were with the Romans, when many words were borrowed by the Germanic tribes from Vulgar Latin. In the British Isles, Roman influence continued but the primary influence, though largely substratal, was from Brythonic Celtic. In the later period the Latin influence became largely literary. Meanwhile, Danes settled northeast England, and the contact situation there was complicated but the major result was a high degree of koineization, reflected in major structural innovations shared with East Norse, primarily Old Jutland Danish. Subsequently, the French dominated southeast England and created a superstrate that resulted in Anglo-French on the one hand and the transfer of thousands of words to English on the other. As these words assimilated to the English lexicon, their affixes became an important part of English word formation, productivity beginning as early as the thirteenth century. The result of all this contact was that English preserved little of its Germanic heritage. Later influences were largely restricted to the lexicon and consisted mainly of learned Greek and latinate roots, many of which became standard English, though frequently of a higher register than native roots of similar import, and facilitated scientific word formation.

This volume presents the collective work of a team of twenty-one scholars who have investigated headless relative clauses in fifteen languages from five language families—all Mesoamerican but one. Headless relative clauses have received little attention in the linguistic literature, despite the many morpho-syntactic and semantic puzzles they raise within and across languages and for our understanding of human language in general. Headless relative clauses have been even more neglected in the study of Mesoamerican languages. This volume constitutes the first in-depth, systematic study of headless relative clauses for any Mesoamerican languages we know of, and the broadest and most articulated crosslinguistic study of headless relative clauses that has been conducted so far. For most of the languages in this volume, there is no descriptive or documentary material on wh-constructions in general, let alone headless relative clauses. Many of the languages are threatened or endangered; all are understudied. All of the chapters constitute original contributions to typological and theoretical linguistics. The first chapter introduces and defines the varieties of headless relative clauses that are investigated in the other chapters, compares them to two related and better-known constructions, namely headed relative clauses and wh- interrogative clauses, summarizes the main findings in a comparative prospective, highlights the importance of studying headless relative clauses to understand human language, and provides a methodological framework for the other chapters and future work. All the other chapters are language-specific and follow a uniform format to facilitate comparisons and generalizations across languages.

This book provides a survey of dictionaries of slang and cant (the language of thieves and beggars) in the period 1859-1936. It covers Britain, American, Australia, India, and other countries then part of the British Empire. Dictionaries by Hotten and Farmer and Henley are covered in particular detail. By the end of the period, war, the Depression, and prohibition all played a vital role in determining what type of dictionaries were being produced.

Although there are continuities with earlier slang lexicography, particularly in the work of Eric Partridge, the period covered by this volume sees a number of marked social and lexicographical changes. The post-war cultural dominance of the United States is evident throughout, as is the influence of African‐American music and language. Slang dictionaries also document attempts by Britain and its colonies to (re)define their sense of national identity. Musical and cultural trends each produced their own characteristic slang, which was manipulated by commercial interests to target the youth market. Homosexual slang was documented first as a diagnostic tool for psychiatrists, but later became an expression of gay pride. Attempts to associate homosexuality with communism label gay rights as a significant threat to the structure of society. Drugs were another threat that became dominant in this period, and the punitive response saw a rapidly increasing prison population. Dictionaries of crime during this period tend to concentrate on the language used inside prisons rather than by criminals at large. But slang is not just for left-wingers. British dictionaries of rhyming slang and dictionaries of Australian slang both express anxieties about immigration through their attempts to construct a working‐class national identity. Right-wing pressure groups in the United States produced dictionaries of slang to reveal the threat represented by homosexuality and rock music. The biggest backlash is found in the numerous dictionaries of CB radio, which allowed blue‐collar white southerners to reconstruct themselves as freedom‐fighting urban cowboys.

This is the first volume in a complete history of the documentation of English cant and slang from 1567 to the present. It gives insights into the early history of slang, the people who used it, and how and why it was recorded. Well over a hundred glossaries of cant and slang were published between 1567 and 1784. The cant lists reveal the secret language allegedly used by thieves and beggars to conceal their illicit conspiracies: this book investigates where and how they were produced and the relationship between such lists and canting literature. The book considers why this period was so fascinated by crime and by criminals, and apparently so obsessed with the need to record their language. How far, it asks, are the lists genuine records of contemporary cant, and how far the products of literary invention? Who produced them, and how were they researched? Who bought them, and what did they hope to gain from them? It also provides unusual and unexpected insights into the underworlds of early modern England.

This book is the second volume of the history of the recording and uses of slang and criminal cant and takes the story from 1785 to 1858, and explores their manifestations in the United States and Australia. During this period, glossaries of cant were thrown into the shade by dictionaries of slang, which now covered a broad spectrum of non-standard English, including the language of thieves. This book shows how Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue revolutionized the lexicography of the underworld. It explores the compilation and content of the earliest Australian and American slang glossaries, whose authors included the thrice-transported James Hardy Vaux and the legendary George Matsell, New York City's first chief of police, whose The Secret Language of Crime: The Rogue's Lexicon informed the script of Martin Scorcese's film Gangs of New York. Cant represented a tangible danger to life and property, but slang threatened to undermine good behaviour and social morality. This book shows how and why they were at once repellent and seductive. The book's account casts new light on language and life in some of the darker regions of Great Britain and the English-speaking world.

John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808) was the first complete dictionary of Scots and is a landmark in the development of historical lexicography. This book is the first full‐scale study of Jamieson’s work on both the Dictionary and the later Supplement of 1825. Using Jamieson’s correspondence and surviving manuscript sources, it traces the evolution of the Dictionary project, from Jamieson’s early linguistic fieldwork to the production and promotion of the Dictionary over twenty years later. It discusses Jamieson’s editorial methods and examines in detail the content of the Dictionary, highlighting Jamieson’s pioneering of the historical method, as well as his innovative use of contemporary and popular sources. It also reveals how Jamieson continually revised and updated his text, aided by a growing number of contributors and specialist consultants – among them Sir Walter Scott – and describes how his work was supplemented by later editors, ensuring that the Dictionary dominated Scots lexicography for over a century, providing inspiration to generations of creative writers, as well as source material for the major historical dictionaries of English and Scots that were to follow.

This book tells the history of the Oxford English Dictionary from its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. It explores the cultural background from which the idea of a comprehensive historical dictionary emerged as a new concept in the lexicography of English, and traces the process of bringing this concept to fruition, from the first attempts to collect quotation evidence in the 1850s, under the auspices of the Philological Society of London, through the engagement of Oxford University Press as the Dictionary’s publisher, the appearance of the first printed fascicle in 1884, and various other publishing developments, to the launching of the OED as an online database in 2000 and beyond. It also examines the evolution of the lexicographers’ working methods, and provides much information about the individuals who have contributed to the project over the last century and a half. Numerous individual words, and their entries in the Dictionary, are also discussed.

Metaphor is pervasive in language, and recent interest has focused on the systematic connections between different concepts, such as heat and anger (fuming, inflamed), sight and understanding (clear, see), or bodies and landscape (hill-foot, river-mouth). Lack of a comprehensive data source has made it difficult to obtain an overview of this phenomenon in any language, but this situation was transformed for English by the completion in 2009 of the Historical Thesaurus of English (HT). The only historical thesaurus ever produced for any language, the HT is organized in semantic categories, each containing lists of words used to express a given concept at particular points of time. It is thus possible to compare historical links between categories from a new perspective, gaining fresh insights into how the language has developed. The chapters in this volume derive from the Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus project at the University of Glasgow, which has undertaken an empirical investigation of the foundations and nature of metaphor using this unique evidence base. Each chapter offers a case study focusing on metaphor in a different semantic domain of English, including Address, Animals, Authority, Colour, Death, Excitement, Fear, Food, Head, Landscape, Mental Illness, Plants, Reading, Theft, and Weapons. The chapters are grouped into three sections, corresponding to the three main divisions of the HT itself—the External World, the Mental World, and the Social World—and each section is preceded by an introduction setting the chapters within a broader theoretical context.

This book epitomizes the history of Roget's Thesaurus as the merger of a dictionary of synonyms and a topical, i.e. non-alphabetical, dictionary. It has all the linguistic features of a text. Its many editions between 1852 and 2002 are marked by special lexicographical as well as socio-political elements. It has adopted a model function with respect to other languages as, for example, German, French, and Spanish. Its most outstanding feature, the semantic order of its words, is illustrated by a comparison with John Wilkins' ‘Tables’. It can be used as a starting point for an inquiry into the serial structure of the mental lexicon. It has special potential for cognitive investigation and didactic application. In a final analysis, the book argues that synonymy, as made practical in every thesaurus, is indispensable for human communication by language.

Popular readings of Johnson as a dictionary-maker often depict him as a writer who both laments — and attempts to control — the state of the language. This book looks at the range of Johnson’s writings on, and the complexity of his thinking about, language and lexicography, not least with reference to the difficulties of power when exerted over the ‘sea of words’. Dictionary-making, for Johnson, came to be seen as a long and difficult voyage round the world of the English language. While such images play their own role in lexicographical tradition, Johnson would, as this volume explores, also make them very much his own. Johnson’s metaphors can invite us to consider — and reconsider — the processes by which a dictionary might be made and the kind of destination it might seek, as well as the state of language that might be reached by such endeavours. For Johnson, where the dictionary-maker might go, and what should be accomplished along the way, can raise a range of pertinent and perhaps troubling questions. Paying close attention to Johnson’s attitudes to language change, loanwords, usage, spelling, history, and authority, this volume engages with the evolution of his ideas about the nature, purpose, and methods of lexicography and the limits of the power the dictionary-maker might assume. While Johnson, of necessity, repeatedly probes problems of meaning and use, related issues of control, and obedience, and variation and change, can often be equally prominent, alongside his commitment to evidence, and the uses to which this might be put.

This book is a study of Sir Thomas Elyot’s contribution to lexicography and the English lexicon in the Renaissance. In a period when Latin was the universal language in European culture, learning, and diplomacy, Elyot’s work reflects the growing role of the vernacular, not only in such books as The Governour, but even more so in the Latin–English dictionary which plainly envisages English being used in some of the key areas dominated by Latin and which equips his countrymen for this change. Using the Oxford English Dictionary and the OED Online as research tools, the study documents Elyot’s enrichment of the English lexicon and the impact which his lexicographical approach and method had on contemporary and later dictionary-making.

Small Dictionaries and Curiosity is a contribution to the history of lexicography, which gives an account of the first European dictionaries and wordlists of minority languages and dialects, from the end of the Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century. These wordlists were collected by people who were curious about the unrecorded or little-known languages they heard around them. They come from the whole of Europe, from the British Isles to the Ottoman Empire, and from the Basque country to the eastern parts of European Russia. Between them, they document more than forty language varieties. The book gives an account of about ninety of these dictionaries and wordlists, some of them single-page jottings and some of them full-sized printed books, paying attention to their content and their context alike. Its perspective is not only that of the history of linguistics, but that of the cultural history and the intellectual history of Europe.

The rediscovery of the classical texts of Greek and Latin antiquity, the progress in the sciences, and the immense extension of the geographical knowledge of the world during the Renaissance created an unparalleled need for vocabulary expansion in the European languages. Latin was still the language of learning, but a growing nationalism called for a lexical development in the vernaculars. The printing press made possible the production of dictionaries and their wide dissemination. Sixteenth-century Europe is linguistically characterized by a high productivity in dictionary publications. These are pan-European in character: they are based on the same Greek and Latin source texts, the same recognized authorial texts of the leading contemporary experts, they are polyglot for tradespeople and travellers, and they are multilingual for an educated readership. The present book investigates the relationship between these polyglot and multilingual works, demonstrates the influence of European scholarship (e.g. Ambrogio Calepino, Conrad Gesner, Hadrianus Junius, Robertus Stephanus), describes the authorial stance in word explanations, morphological analyses, and translations, and provides the first account of how early printers used typography to present the compiler’s lexical information on the page.

This book presents a series of systematic, empirically based studies of word meanings. Each chapter investigates key expressions drawn from different domains of the lexicon – concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social. The examples chosen are complex and culturally important: they include the cross-linguistic semantics of basic social categories like men, women, and children, of physical qualities like hot, hard, and rough, of emotions like happiness, of words to express pain, of speech-acts including suggesting and apologising, and of abstract nouns including trauma, temperature and violence. The languages represented include English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri and Malay. The book opens with a review of the neglected status of lexical semantics in linguistics and a discussion of the natural semantic metalanguage methodology used throughout the book. The authors consider a wide range of methodological and analytical issues including lexical polysemy, semantic change, the relationship between lexical and grammatical semantics, and the concepts of semantic molecules and templates. They ground their discussions in real examples from different cultures and draw on work ranging from Leibniz, Locke, and Bentham, to popular works such as autobiographies and memoirs, and the Dalai Lama’s writings on happiness.