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The Period Dictionaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Charles C. Fries
Charles C. Fries*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

Nine years before the Oxford English Dictionary was finally completed, Sir William Craigie proposed his scheme of period dictionaries. Pointing to the many problems in the language still unsolved, and to the “large quantities of interesting material” daily set aside because of the limitations of space, he insisted that this was the only way to meet completely the needs of scholars in English language and of serious students of our literature. Neither he nor the others who have taken up his proposal have ever conceived of these period dictionaries as works to supplant the Oxford Dictionary. They could not because they approach the language with essentially different purposes. Sir William Craigie in his report of 1919 phrases quite clearly the relationship of these later dictionaries to their parent:

The Society's dictionary has easily outstripped any thing else of the kind in existence and contains such a general survey of the English language down to the present day as may never be entirely superseded; but its own plan on the one hand, and the immensity of the material on the other, prevent it from being absolutely final. Dealing as it does with English of all periods, from the seventh century to the twentieth, it has been impossible for it (beyond certain limits) to devote special attention to any one time. Yet each definite period of the language has its own characteristics, which can only be appreciated when it is studied by itself, and which are necessarily obscured when it merely comes in as one link in the long chain of the language as a whole.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , September 1932 , pp. 890 - 891
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1932

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