History of English and American lexicography.

The history of dictionary-making for the English language goes to Old English period where its 1^st traces are found in the form of glosses of religious books with interlinear translations from Latin. Regular bilingual English-Latin dictionaries were already in existence in the 15^th century. They were associated with foreign language study from the time immemorial. The unilingual dictionary is a comparatively recent type. The first unilingual dictionary explaining words by English equivalents appeared in 1604. Its title was “A Table Alphabeticale, Containing and Teaching the True Writing and Understanding of Hard Usual English Words Borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latin and French”. The first attempt of a dictionary including all the words of the language was made by Nathaniel Bailey who in 1721 published his 1^st edition of “Universal Etymological English Dictionary” including the pronunciation and etymology.

The golden age of English lexicography began in the 19^th century when English Philological Society started work on compiling what is known as “Oxford English Dictionary” (OED), it but was named “New English Dictionary on Historical Principles”.

The principles, structure and scope of OED, its merits and demerits are discussed up to nowadays. Its prestige is enormous. It is considered superior to corresponding dictionaries of other languages.

It has some variants: “The Sorter Oxford English Dictionary”, “The Concise OED” (1911). Another dictionary created by joined effort – Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary.

The 1^st American dictionary was compiled by Samuel Johnson. He published in 1798 “A School Dictionary”. It was followed in 1800 by another dictionary that showed sights of Americanization. It was Noah Webster considered to be father of American lexicography, who broke away from English idiom and embodied in his book the specifically American usage of his time.

His 1^st book “American Dictionary of the English Language” appeared in 2 volumes in 1828 and later sustained numerous revised and enlarged editions. In many respects Webster follows the lead of Johnson, but he attempts to simplify the spelling and pronunciation that were current in the USA of the period.

Webster’s dictionary enjoyed great popularity. It was due not only to accuracy and clarity of definitions, but also to richness of additional information of encyclopaedic character, which had become a tradition in American lexicography.

Webster’s book aims to treat the entire vocabulary of the language providing definitions, pronunciation and etymology. As an encyclopaedia it gives explanations about things named, including scientific and technical subjects.

This dictionary was revised in 1864, 1890, 1909, 1934, 1961.

The other 3 American dictionaries are: “The Century Dictionary” (1891), “Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary” (1875), “Random House Dictionary of English Language” (1967).

Types of dictionaries

The term “dictionary” is used to denote a book listing words of a language with their meanings and often with data regarding pronunciation, usage, origin.

	UNILINGUAL	BILINGUAL (MULTILINGUAL)
General	Explanatory dictionaries irrespective of their bulk	English-Ukrainian, Ukrainian-English etc. Multilingual dictionaries
	Etymological, frequency, phonetic, rhyming and thesaurus type dictionaries
Special	Glossaries of scientific and other special terms, concordances. Dictionaries of abbreviations, antonyms, borrowings, new words, proverbs, synonyms, surnames, toponyms etc.	Dictionaries of scientific and other special terms. Dictionaries of abbreviations, phraseologisms, proverbs, synonyms etc.
	Dictionaries of American English, dialects, slang.	Dictionaries of Old English and Middle English with explanation in Modern English

Unilingual or explanatory dictionary is the dictionary in which the words and their definitions belong to the same language.

E.g.: “Oxford English dictionary” in 13 volumes (Oxford 1933).

Bilingual or translation dictionaries are those which explain words by giving their equivalents in another language.

Multilingual or polyglot dictionaries are not numerous, they serve chiefly the purpose of comparing synonyms and terminology in various languages.

E.g.: “American Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in Principal Indo-European Languages” (Chicago 1949).

Unilingual dictionaries are further subdivided with regard to time.

E.g.: Etymological dictionary which state the origin of words “Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary”.

Both bilingual and unilingual dictionaries can be general and special.

General represent the vocabulary as a whole with a degree of completeness depending upon the scope and bulk of the book in question. They include frequency dictionaries, i.e. lists of words, each of which is followed by a record of its frequency of occurrences in one or several sets of reading matter.

E.g.: “Semantic Frequency List for English, French, German, Spanish” (1940).

A rhyming dictionary is also a general dictionary, though arranged in inversive order and so is “Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases” in spite of its usual arrangement.

General dictionaries are contrasted to special dictionaries whose stated aim is to cover only a certain specific part of the vocabulary. Special dictionaries may be further subdivided depending on whether the words are chosen according to the sphere of human activity in which they are used (technical dictionaries), the type of the units themselves (phraseological dictionaries), relationships existing between them (dictionaries of synonyms etc).

E.g.: W.G.Smith “English Idioms” (1949)

Brewer “A Desk Book of Idioms and Idiomatic Phrases”

Crabb’s “English Synonyms Explained”.

Special unilingual dictionaries which give definitions of terms (medical, technical, art, musical) are called glossaries.

E.g.: F.P.Hamp “A Glossary of American Technical Linguistic Usage” (1957).

Dictionaries recording the complete vocabulary of a particular author are called concordances. They should be distinguished from those that deal only with difficult words, i.e. glossaries.

Taking up territorial considerations one comes across dialect dictionaries and dictionaries of Americanisms.

Finally, dictionaries may be classifies into linguistic and non-linguistic. The non-linguistic are dictionaries giving information in all branches of knowledge – the encyclopaedias. They deal not with words, but with facts and concepts.

The best-known encyclopaedias of English-speaking world are:

“Encyclopaedia Britannica”

“Encyclopaedia Americana”.