The classified glossaries of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana, preserved by medieval manuscripts in many different versions, are also transmitted in numerous papyri, some as early as the first/second century CE. This piece examines the relationship of the papyri to the medieval versions, showing that different papyri are related to different medieval versions and that therefore at least four of those versions had already diverged from one another in antiquity. Surprisingly, one of those four is the Celtis glossary (Vienna suppl. Gr. 43), whose ‘medieval’ attestation is so late as really to be from the Renaissance. Further investigation shows that the papyrus related to Celtis (CLTP III.11 = P.Stras. inv. Gr. 1173) is not a direct ancestor of the Celtis glossary as it appears in the Renaissance manuscript; the Celtis glossary must therefore be older than this papyrus, which was copied in the third or fourth century CE. And since the papyrus’ transliteration (the Latin is in Greek script) probably dates to the first/second century, the Celtis glossary probably goes back at least that far – and it is possible that the Renaissance version is a retransliteration of one that circulated with Latin in Greek script.

This chapter attempts to reconstruct the textual history of the Latin–Greek glossary known as Hermeneumata Celtis, from antiquity to the year 1495, when the Humanist Conrad Celtis transcribed the work from a medieval antigraph that was subsequently lost. The thematic glossary of Hermeneumata Celtis is unique among other extant bilingual glossaries because it was supplemented, at some time in Late Antiquity, with the inclusion of Greek words and definitions culled from a Greek alphabetical lexicon similar to Hesychius (but possibly earlier). Other increments came from contamination with other thematic glossaries; the most recognisable points of contact are with what modern scholars call the Hermeneumata Montepessulana.

This chapter gives an overview of dictionaries, broadly conceived to include monolingual and bilingual wordlists for readers at all levels, in the history of English from the beginnings of Anglo-Saxon literacy to the present day. It argues against a reductive view of dictionaries as primarily agents of standardisation and authority, expressions of the ‘dismal sacred word’. Its arrangement is roughly chronological, beginning with Anglo-Saxon glossography and the lexicography of later medieval English, before turning to the bilingual and monolingual English dictionaries of the early modern period; to the monolingual dictionaries of the eighteenth century; and to the relationship of lexicography to two very important aspects of Late Modern English, namely its pluricentricity and its use as an acquired language. It concludes with a last look at the relationship of English lexicography with the ‘dismal sacred word’.

Chaucer’s works were written during the late fourteenth century, a period which saw considerable changes in the functions of the English language as it came to replace French and Latin as the languages of written record. As well as being an important source for the scholarly understanding of late Middle English, Chaucer’s works shed light on the status of English and its variety of registers and dialects, enabling scholars to gain a deeper awareness of the sociolinguistic connotations of its different forms and usages. The Canterbury Tales, with its array of pilgrims drawn from a variety of professions, social classes and geographical regions narrating a series of tales reflecting a wide range of genres, is a valuable source of evidence for historical pragmatics. This chapter shows the way in which Chaucer’s text offers insights into the conventions of social interaction, including forms of address, politeness and verbal aggression, and the use of discourse markers.

This conversation between Ilan Stavans and Haoran Tong centers on the evolution of Chinese dictionary-making that reflects a rich sociocultural and political tradition that spans millennia. Dictionaries translate the historical into the present, the frontier into the inland. The refinement of character dictionaries such as Erya and Shuowen jiezi facilitated the writing system’s revolutions. The emergence of bilingual dictionaries documented the transformation of Chinese phonetic notations. From exegesis of Confucian classics to compilations of ethnic dialects, institutional dictionary-making by the literati class remains an immutable symbol of the power to normalize, standardize, and harmonize. The divergence of definitions, notations, and arrangements of words across various dictionaries mirrors a proliferation of ideas on the future of the Chinese language and the Chineseness it embodies.

Africa is a linguistically diverse continent, hosting between 1,250 and 2,100 languages. Some of the prominent languages include Swahili, Hausa, Lingala, Amharic, Yoruba, Oromo, Zulu, Xhosa, and Sotho. Lexicography in African languages has been shaped by colonialism and subsequent language politics. Pioneer dictionaries were compiled by European prospectors, missionaries, and colonial administrators, primarily for their own use as they needed to learn African languages and communicate with local communities. While those early dictionaries made landmark contributions toward the development of African languages and some of them remain useful even today, they often failed to accurately represent African languages’ linguistic, cultural, and religious systems. Mother-tongue speakers of African languages started to drive internally motivated lexicographic projects in the twentieth century, prioritizing mother-tongue speakers as target users. Dictionaries began to occupy a prominent position in the development of African languages. This has resulted in some governments such as in South Africa investing in dictionary-making and universities offering academic and professional lexicographic training.

Historical thesauri are indispensable tools for understanding the historical lexicon of English. The arrangement of historical lexis by semantic field reveals patterns in vocabulary which cannot be seen in an alphabetical ordering, and so historical thesauri are essential for the investigation of cultural development and the history of ideas as well as charting the evolution of the lexicon. This chapter gives examples from the Historical Thesaurus of English and its related projects, including A Thesaurus of Old English, The Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England and Love, Sex, and Marriage: A Historical Thesaurus. It enumerates the key principles of a historical thesaurus, discusses sources of lexical data as well as the organisational principles by which historical thesauri arrange words, and overviews research projects in the history of English which have been made possible by historical thesauri.

This conversation between Ilan Stavans and Hassan Hamze is about the birth of the Arabic dictionary in the eighth century, a birth linked to that of other linguistic and religious disciplines in a flourishing society that would inherit the sciences of the ancients before developing and transmitting them to modern Western civilization. The small, utilitarian lexicons quickly gave way to the great dictionary al-ʿAyn, which established the Arabic lexicographical tradition. The bilingual dictionary did not appear until much later, first with the languages of the Arab-Muslim world, then with Latin in Andalusia after the eleventh century, and with other languages, particularly Western ones, in the modern era. Its role today is significant in terminological creation. The Arabic dictionary is, above all, a dictionary of word families classified by consonantal roots. The classification by words, which appeared very early in specialized dictionaries, did not appear in the general dictionary until the mid twentieth century, under the influence of the European dictionary, due to the issues posed by the status of short vowels and broken plurals.

A reflection on how dictionaries define themselves, followed by an invitation to explore the parallel histories of dictionaries in twenty different languages, including ancient Greek, Arabic, English, Esperanto, French, Hebrew, Nahuatl, Quechua, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish.

This tri-part chapter reports early and modern women’s roles in language contact, transmission and codification, acknowledging limitations of mediated and absent evidence. In contact, English has been both a colonising and colonised language. Women’s surviving Englishes index privilege or vulnerability, and contextualised social values: Standard English mediating ex-slave narratives symbolised tyranny and humanity simultaneously. In corpus studies, surviving correspondence and other genres hint at literate women’s roles in the transmission and development of English; records and roles are more elusive as status falls. Women’s linguistic innovations in changes ‘from below’ may reflect social subordination. Educated women increasingly lead changes ‘from above’, as education and standardisation spread. Women’s codifying texts initially overrepresented their roles as domestic educators, but their rhetorical responses to social inequities occasionally provoke statutory redefinitions of terms such as person and woman.

The third chapter builds on an increase in Arabic manuscript circulation from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries in the Deccan to demonstrate how Arabic philology became a significant intellectual pursuit for a growing learned community. My research on manuscript notes traces textual practices and how they changed over time, and how this contributed to a localisation of Arabic learning across the multilingual landscape of the subcontinent. It zooms in on scholar-scribes, copyist-scribes, and owners of manuscripts. It highlights ‘definitive texts’ in the fields of Arabic grammar, rhetoric, and lexicography and what we know about their circulation across the Deccan and beyond based on two manuscript collections from Hyderabad, and the Bijapur collection. Book exchanges and the emergence of ‘commonplace notebooks’ as a multi-layered intertextual product of intellectual engagements with a scholarly text make plain the social and cultural dynamisms of this field of learning. The formation of cultural tastes in Arabic philology, new studying enactments of manuscripts, and a socially more diverse community shaped the significances of reading and writing Arabic in South Asia.

This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Sue Atkins, the Grande Dame of lexicography, who passed away in 2021. In a prologue we argue that she must be seen on a par with other visionaries and their visions, such as Paul Dirac in mathematics or Beethoven in music. We review the last half century through the eyes of Sue Atkins. In the process, insights of other luminaries come into the picture, including those of Patrick Hanks, Michael Rundell, Adam Kilgarriff, John Sinclair, and Charles Fillmore. This material serves as background to start thinking out of the box about the future of dictionaries. About fifty oppositions are presented, in which the past is contrasted with the future, divided into five subsections: the dictionary-making process, supporting tools and concepts, the appearance of the dictionary, facts about the dictionary, and the image of the dictionary. Moving from the future of dictionaries to the future of lexicographers, the argument is made that dictionary makers need to join forces with the Big Data companies, a move that, by its nature, brings us to the US and thus Americans, including Gregory Grefenstette, Erin McKean, Laurence Urdang, and Sidney I. Landau. In an epilogue, the presentation’s methodology is defined as being “a fact-based extrapolation of the future” and includes good advice from Steve Jobs.

A late-medieval Anglo-Saxon manuscript glossary, illustrated with some drawings to clarify meanings, introduces a tradition of pictorial illustration in printed English dictionaries, a tradition that began on a small scale in the seventeenth century, when it first received theoretical justification. Although the leading lexicographer Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century and the authoritative New (later Oxford) English Dictionary in the nineteenth century eschewed pictorial illustration, such images flourished in encyclopaedias and also in dictionaries produced by the Merriam-Webster Co. in the US. During the twentieth century special dictionaries for students of English as a second language, including several published by Oxford University Press, made ready use of pictorial illustration, and the practice of including selected pictorial illustrations continues to be popular in standard dictionaries. Although space in a printed dictionary is severely limited, and no single picture can adequately illustrate the name of a thing, lexicographical inquiry conducted online can now generate a more informative array of images that together can better illustrate the meaning of a word.

This chapter discusses linguistic variation in Slavic languages by presenting an overview of the relationship between human communication in the society and the corresponding linguistic features. In this chapter we focus on the parameters of variation according to the language user, such as age or dialects, and according to the language use, such as communicative functions or communication styles, e.g. politeness. We cite both qualitative and quantitative methods for studying aspects of sociolinguistic variation. Examples are drawn from large corpora of two Slavic languages, Russian and Serbo-Croatian, with a particular focus on academic writing, news reporting, and reporting personal experience in social media, as well as from dictionaries and field studies.

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.