Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to English Dictionaries
- The Cambridge Companion to English Dictionaries
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Part I Issues in English Lexicography
- Part II English Dictionaries Throughout the Centuries
- Chapter 8 A Dictionary Ecosystem: Four Centuries of English Lexicography
- Seventeenth-Century English Dictionaries: Hard Words
- Eighteenth-Century English Dictionaries: Prescriptivism and Completeness
- Nineteenth-Century English Dictionaries: Descriptivism
- Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Dictionaries
- Part III Dictionaries of English and Related Varieties
- Guide to Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to Literature
Chapter 8 - A Dictionary Ecosystem: Four Centuries of English Lexicography
from Part II - English Dictionaries Throughout the Centuries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2020
- The Cambridge Companion to English Dictionaries
- The Cambridge Companion to English Dictionaries
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Part I Issues in English Lexicography
- Part II English Dictionaries Throughout the Centuries
- Chapter 8 A Dictionary Ecosystem: Four Centuries of English Lexicography
- Seventeenth-Century English Dictionaries: Hard Words
- Eighteenth-Century English Dictionaries: Prescriptivism and Completeness
- Nineteenth-Century English Dictionaries: Descriptivism
- Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Dictionaries
- Part III Dictionaries of English and Related Varieties
- Guide to Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to Literature
Summary
This chapter gives an overview of the traditions of English lexicography from the early modern period to the present day. Rather than presenting a linear story of evolutionary development, it surveys changes in the whole ecosystem of lexicographical publishing, from the most elementary spelling-books to the most scholarly multi-volume dictionaries, emphasising the books which came into the hands of the most readers: these were of course the smallest and cheapest. It is therefore attentive to changes in publishing technology (from handpress to machine press to digital) and to information about dictionaries as material books, such as physical size, number of editions, and size of print runs.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to English Dictionaries , pp. 89 - 100Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020