New Editions of English Dictionaries

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

“ OF making many books there is no end,” said the Hebrew Preacher. If he had lived in our day, he might have simplified his riddle by saying, “ Of the making of one book there is no end,” and we should have known that he meant a dictionary. When “ J. K.,” just two centuries ago, issued the first edition of his New English Dictionary, he found only about ten thousand words to include in his Compleat Collection of the Most Proper and Significant Words commonly used in the Language. But the language was growing, and to the second edition he had to make “ many important additions.” Bailey had a similar experience, and so had Johnson. And when Noah Webster brought out the first edition of his American Dictionary of the English Language, in 1828, it contained twelve thousand words never collected in any dictionary before. In 1841 Webster published his second edition, enlarged by several thousand words, and the last considerable labor of his life was the addition of “ some hundreds ” more in 1843. Every edition that has appeared since his death has repeated the same tale, and it is almost incredible that only ten years after Webster’s International Dictionary was first given to the public, it should be necessary to add a Supplement of twenty-five thousand new words.¹

An examination of this Supplement is most instructive. One cannot even turn the pages and look at the illustrations without being impressed with the evidences of rapid growth in our knowledge of fishes and insects, birds and plants. Another class of illustrations suggests the extent to which we have become citizens of the whole world, familiar with dress and customs in every land and every climate. Recent wars, too, have yielded a harvest of words. A decade ago who knew anything about dumdum bullets and retreating gun carriages ? about Morro or Moros, yamen or Boxer, kopje or trek ? We did not ride in automobiles then, or hope to ride soon in aerodromes. Golf had not given us its bogey and its hazard. The Marconi system and the Bertillon system were alike caviare to the general. All these things, and their multitudinous kindred, are gathered into this fascinating Supplement.

There may be two opinions about the wisdom of giving countenance to some of the slang words that we find here, — mosey, or jamboree, for instance ; but the reader of popular fiction certainly has his rights, and must not be ignored by the modern lexicographer. Whatever we may think about new words that must be called slang, pure and simple, it is a pleasure to get an authoritative account of certain dialect words that recent literature is making familiar, and to recover now and then an ancient word, full of a Chaucerian virtue, that had fallen into obsoleteness before the revival of interest in the early makers of English.

A word should be said, too, in praise of the newly revised Pronouncing Gazetteer and Pronouncing Biographical Dictionary, the latter of which now contains ten thousand names. Altogether, this edition of the International Dictionary is so full in its vocabulary ; so clear, accurate, and condensed in its definitions ; so admirably arranged for rapid use ; and so largely equipped with auxiliary aids, that the more one uses it, the more satisfying he finds it.

The new edition of the Standard Dictionary ² marks as strongly the constant growth of the language. The original edition of the Standard, issued only in 1893, contained a much larger number of words than any other dictionary; but the publishers now find it necessary to add nearly a hundred pages to the twenty-one hundred that constituted their general vocabulary. The Addenda include over seventeen thousand new words, new applications of old words, and phrases that have come into such use as to be fairly entitled to inclusion in a wordbook. Exploration, commerce, and war ; religion, science, the arts, literature, and common life, — all make their contributions. In the Appendix the list of Proper Names has been greatly increased, and is now a combined biographical dictionary, gazetteer, and list of pseudonyms, sobriquets, names prominent in fiction, etc., in one alphabetical arrangement, filling a hundred and fifty pages. Other changes and improvements, both in the body of the book and in the Appendix, unite to emphasize the judgment pronounced in the pages of this magazine when the original edition was reviewed at length, — that the Standard is a “ soundly constructed, progressive, popular dictionary of encyclopædic nature.” H.R.G.