This chapter looks beyond the temporal scope of the rest of book to the legacy of the OED’s empirical principles for contemporary dictionaries. The chapter argues that there are limitations inherent in any lexicographical model whose aim is to document a language as it is commonly and widely used. Though this ‘majority rule’ approach may seem democratic, it cannot help but marginalize people whose practices or identities—and the language by which they express them—diverge from dominant norms. While digital advances have enabled new ways of making dictionaries, from corpus-building to online crowdsourcing, these have not allowed lexicographers to evade the ideological pitfalls that surround the documentation of ‘minority usage’, whether present or past. The chapter closes with a reflection on the future of historical research into language and sexuality, both within the dictionary and beyond it.

This chapter introduces some of the dominant institutional structures through which sexuality in Britain was interpreted. It surveys the relationship between lexicography and the law via buggery and sodomy, perhaps the words most familiarly associated with same-sex intercourse in pre-1900 English. The chapter defamiliarizes them by comparing the diverse explanations given to them across hard-word and general dictionaries, law lexicons, and legal treatises. Lexicographers constructed buggery and sodomy as crimes beyond the bounds of human law, as well as the natural and divine laws on which it was meant to be based; in so doing, they also built for their readers a contrastive model of lawful erotic behaviour. However, the scaffolding of sexual normativity was unstable. Dictionaries ascribed conflicting polysemies to buggery and sodomy, which were variably said to include ‘copulation’ between men, between women, between woman and man ‘unnaturally’, or between man or woman and beast. At the same time, buggery and sodomy were often rendered not only illegal but incoherent, as cross-sex-specific definitions of copulation itself precluded the possibility of same-sex activity.

This book explores how the language of sexuality was codified in English dictionaries from 1604 to 1933, surveying the centuries before the coining of identity terms such as queer and heterosexual and then the decades when they had just begun entering wider currency. The introduction explains the temporal and spatial scope of the book and its understanding of sexuality and dictionary. It places the ideological histories of these two concepts in parallel, tracing how both became subject to the scientific spirit of the late nineteenth century—sexuality under the medical lens of sexology, lexicography under the empirical principles of the Oxford English Dictionary. Though prior studies that bring together lexicography and sexuality have been conducted within a range of disciplines, these have often occurred in isolation from each other. In an effort to bridge the divide between dictionary scholarship and queer linguistics in particular, the introduction puts forward an analytical framework which builds on the strengths of both research traditions. This is followed by an outline of how the discussion will be structured across the rest of the book.

This chapter examines how lexicographers symbolically policed the borders of English not only by distancing same-sex practices from English society but by disbarring words for those practices from the English language. Though terms for women who had sex with women existed in other Early Modern English text types (and in the bilingual dictionaries that influenced early monolingual lexicographers), they were barely acknowledged in hard-word and general dictionaries. Sexuality between men, though initially well-represented, was also excised by many general lexicographers in the wake of Samuel Johnson, reflecting a growing concern that dictionaries should record only ‘proper’ English. Acts that were inadmissible in polite lexicography would partially re-emerge in dictionaries of criminal cant, which encoded an earthy alternative vocabulary for the men associated with London’s molly houses during the eighteenth century. However, even cant dictionaries would edge carefully around the existence of intimacy between women. And as dictionaries of the underworld gave way to those of fashionable slang in the nineteenth century, unnatural sex of any sort was once again thrust beyond the pale.

This chapter explores the contours of illness and embodiment in medical lexicography. From the early modern period, dictionaries subjected sexual deviance to medical as well as legal and moral regulation, as abominable acts were linked with aberrant anatomies. While hard-word and general dictionaries offered cautionary tales of hypospadians committing bestiality and sodomites afflicted with anal disfigurements, specialist medical lexicons were far more preoccupied with women who had sex with women. Lexicographers endowed these tribades or confricatrices with preternaturally large clitorises which they used to have penetrative sex—though whether clitoral enlargement was the cause of tribadism or its consequence was a question whose answer varied from one author to the next. That dictionaries aimed at physicians were able to dissect women’s sexuality with such candour prompts us to consider the exclusivity of medical lexicography in both social and material terms: with respect to the barring of women from the elite medical professions until the late nineteenth century, and to the escalating price of specialist works compared to the cost of dictionaries aimed at lay users.