The Word Detective

by John Simpson

  It used to be thought that the first occurrence of the word dictionary in English was in William Bonde’s Pylgrimage of Perfection (1526). But a recent surprise discovery uncovered evidence of the word’s existence from around 1480 (the Medulla Grammatice, or the “Marrow of Grammar,” a collection of Latin-English glossaries held in the British Library). So we now have the word from the very late Middle Ages. It feels significant when research causes a word to pop back into an earlier band of the language, as has happened here.

  Dictionary is the first word recorded in English to mean “a dictionary.” That may sound like an obvious statement, but often other words occur sporadically before a keyword is settled on. In the case of dictionary, the next word that was tried, in 1568, was calepin, from the name of an Augustinian friar who wrote a famous Latin dictionary first published in 1502. It was a well-known word in the early sixteenth century, but fell into disuse after that. Other synonyms include world of words (1598–), lexicon (1603–), and thesaurus (1823–).

  As expected, the word dictionary (like lexicon and thesaurus) comes from the Romance rather than the Germanic tradition. Scholarly medieval and Renaissance words tend to arise on that side of the language divide. Once established in English, dictionary did develop new meanings over time. By the 1570s it was comfortable enough in the language to sprout two new meanings—or really just adjustments of the old meaning. In 1576 the OED notes that it could be used of any alphabetically arranged reference book or encyclopaedia, not just one with headwords and definitions; and in 1579 records show that it made a larger jump, to mean the personal vocabulary of any individual person—your “dictionary” was the sum total of words you knew. We still use a variation of this sense when we say “Purple is not in my dictionary” (and other things like that, obviously). By 1609 the poet and dramatist George Chapman starting referring to someone as a “walking dictionary,” and that is a use also preserved today. By 1829, if you were a know-it-all user and consumer of jawbreakers, then you might be said to have “swallowed a dictionary.”

  I explained to my students that the book traditionally regarded as the first English dictionary was not published until 1604: the Table Alphabeticall, by schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey. In truth, this wasn’t what we think of as a dictionary. It was almost a translation dictionary, for it only contained what the author regarded as “hard” words—usually words of Latin or Greek derivation—with which the untutored Briton might need help. It was, as its author candidly stated, written principally for women and children.

  The hard-words tradition dominated the early scraps between the lexicographers who were competing to publish small dictionaries in the early seventeenth century. In order to satisfy a growing market, each dictionary had to be slightly larger than the last, or have some new feature—scanty etymologies, regional words, slightly more common words, classical allusions, geographical names, proverbs and phrases, and gradually—by the latter end of the seventeenth century, and in works such as Elisha Coles’s English Dictionary of 1676—we started to find dictionaries that we might classify as dictionaries today.

  There was no theory of lexicography in those days. Definitions were normally lists of synonyms or brief descriptions of the term defined; the etymologies were only as good as the etymological dictionaries of the day (and some were rather good); there was as yet no help with pronunciation. Dictionaries in the seventeenth century were very workaday works, often produced by almost anonymous schoolmasters, for use in the classroom.

  The eighteenth century saw English dictionaries become more obviously commercial. The great English lexicographer of the early eighteenth century was Nathan Bailey, who dominated the market with his cramped, stocky, and yet perversely attractive dictionaries of the period. Bailey would from time to time in his entries cite famous authors who had used the words he treated—as if to give his words a renewed legitimacy. His Universal Etymological Dictionary, first published in 1721, was extraordinarily popular, and not particularly etymological. He is well known for some of his evasive definitions, such as the spider: “an Insect well known”—which harks back to the seventeenth-century amateur tradition. This is to do him a disservice, though, as for most of the time he was operating on a much higher—though often equally conversational—level than this. Take, for instance, his definition of hook-pins: “[in Architecture] taper Iron Pins, only with a Hook Head, to pin the Frame of a Roof or Floor together.” Generally speaking, it helped if you already knew the meaning of what you were looking up, though, before you searched for it in Bailey.

  Nathan Bailey was worried about Dr Johnson. He knew, of course, that the great man had been compiling a dictionary to beat all dictionaries, and he had tried to shore up his own market by publishing a spoiler—a large folio format dictionary that might equal Johnson’s projected two-volume production of 1755. It didn’t, and when Johnson’s dictionary was published, it was rapidly accepted as the standard. Johnson’s page format was elegant, his definitions were elegant—as befitted a journalist and literary man—and were amply supported by quotations from the “best” authors. He was not responsible for introducing our modern spellings for many words, as is sometimes thought, but his choice from among variant spellings of his day was wise, and reinforced their status as the standard spellings of the time (and often of today). Dr Johnson gave the English dictionary—and to some extent, the English language—a legitimacy which it had not possessed in the smaller world of schoolmasterly lexicography. The fact that he introduced a small number of rather quirky definitions (such as the well-known oats: “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”) only seems to have endeared him to his audience.

  The new United States of America developed its own dictionary tradition, led by Noah Webster, an ardent spelling reformer and a citizen and supporter of the Union. His most famous dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language (two volumes: 1828), had a political as well as a lexicographical purpose: Webster wished it to be understood that the United States was as independent of the British Isles in terms of language as it was politically. His dictionary doesn’t feel like a piece of elegant typography, but his definitions are clear, and he was able to introduce words and meanings characteristic of the new America. It didn’t sell particularly well when it was first published, but after his death it was acquired by the brothers George and Charles Merriam, who with new editors gradually took it successfully in hand.

  Webster had not availed himself of the new comparative linguistics which had developed in Europe from the very late eighteenth century. Comparative linguists in Germany and elsewhere had started to work out how some languages that might appear on the face of it to be very remote from each other (such as French and Sanskrit) could be distantly related. Often the links dated from times before the languages were written down, which made this rather an esoteric subject of study. Rules were worked out which demonstrated how the English word fish was genetically related to the Latin word piscis (= fish), for example, and once the initial discoveries had been made, it was possible to envisage a network of related languages in language family trees and their conjoined cultures spreading back for many centuries into the past.

  British scholars followed these developments with great interest in the early nineteenth century. Many of them were members of the Philological Society in London. These ideas about the network of comparative languages informed the discussions in the society about what later became known as the Oxford English Dictionary.

  The line of development from 1857, when the Philological Society debated the state of English dictionaries, through to the completion of the OED, in 1928, is straightforward. The OED draws on this comparative knowledge to investigate the prehistory of English words in other—often related—languages, and then uses the equivalent of a genealogical tree structure, with meanings branching off from the base over time, to illustrate linguistic developments within English.

  The digital, searchable d
ictionary project takes this historical tradition to a new level. The result is as significant for lexicography as were the changes brought about by the invention of printing and the development of monolingual from bilingual dictionaries. Whereas in the past the dictionary had been a static text, at which the reader would sometimes gasp in excitement when discovering some interesting new word by browsing serendipitously through its pages, the digital dictionary offered the possibility of a quantum leap to new avenues of information and research at the level of the whole language, not just the individual word, as well as—eventually—links outwards from the dictionary text to whatever world (of text, knowledge, etc.) the reader wished to explore.

  One of my ongoing concerns is with people who exaggeratedly enjoy the strange and peculiar words of English—those words which apparently amuse and entertain, but which don’t contribute anything useful to the language, and certainly don’t represent the important words of language study. People of this persuasion gravitate towards words which just seem to be there for effect, to be cossetted and purred over. But words are not dolls: who cares about antidisestablishmentarianism from the point of view of real language, or floccinaucinihilipilification (“the action or habit of estimating as worthless”—at one time the longest word in the OED), or mallemaroking (look it up)? Why waste time on them, and certainly why produce books containing lists of them? But it seems no one else shares this view with me.

  Maybe I think of these show-off words as elitist, or at least undeservedly attention-seeking. They are easy to like (or so it seems). But they are outliers—not central to the real language.

  Working with the computer scientists at Waterloo, I was able to start investigating—on computer—what seemed to me much larger language questions. What I wanted to investigate was how words evolved in their passage through time. I wanted to explore patterns: How did what happened in society generally affect language? Why did some words succeed while others didn’t? Which Anglo-Saxon words went underground for centuries after the Norman Conquest, only to reappear—still alive and kicking—five hundred or more years later? Why did Americans need some of the traditional English words as they developed a new, independent country in the eighteenth century, but not others? These aren’t questions for crossword buffs. And you could only hope to answer them if you had collected and correctly analysed enough of the everyday data of English.

  Let’s look briefly at just one of the questions I wanted to investigate: What sorts of words did those early voyagers bring back to English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? The sixteenth century was a period during which the English language reasserted itself as the language of Britain and became a cultural artefact in which great literature, great thoughts, and great invention could be expressed. That sounds like an odd thing to say, but in previous centuries English had been struggling against the French of the Conquest and against the Latin of the church and officialdom, and had never really been able to breathe for itself. Sixteenth- and especially seventeenth-century Britain experienced a sense of expansionism, which in turn led to empire and a more stable relationship between the home country and the numerous locations from which new words might enter English. One of the most important arenas of British expansionism was the Indian Subcontinent. After initial explorations, the British East India Company was awarded a charter in 1600 to trade on behalf of Britain in India. Over the years its role changed, and it came to exercise administrative control across large areas of India from its bases in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay (to use the old names of these cities). The company was granted tax-raising powers by the British government, and even maintained its own army to support its predatory ambitions. Things came to a sorry halt for the East India Company with the Indian Mutiny (now normally called the “Indian Rebellion”) in 1857, after which the power of the company waned, and the British government and the new Indian Civil Service took over the role of managing those parts of India under the sway of the British Raj.

  What does the OED tell us about how the English language tracked these momentous changes? The dictionary shows absolutely no borrowings into English from Hindi (for example) from the dawn of time until the second half of the sixteenth century, before which there was clearly little or no interaction between the nations. From 1550 until 1599 there are five recorded borrowings of words into English from Hindi. And the method of transmission is revealing—all but one are found in English translations of foreign works, so the English-speaking people were introduced to a new area of interest at second hand. It was a symptom of Britain’s early position in the politics of expansionism that when they arrived in the East, or in the New World in the West, they often found Spaniards, or French, or Portuguese there before them, and this has a significant effect on the mediation of words from the original language of the country into English.

  The first borrowing recorded from Hindi is kotwal, an Indian magistrate or police officer, dated from 1582 in English. The word appears in a translation of a Portuguese work by Fernão Lopes de Castanheda (c. 1500–1559), a Portuguese historian who had spent much of his childhood in Portuguese India—the Portuguese were well ahead of other Europeans in India at the time—in the region of Goa. Castanheda’s work was mostly published posthumously and was not translated into English until thirty years or so after his death.

  Four of the remaining sixteenth-century words from India come from another translation, which is from the work of the Dutch merchant and historian Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563–1611). Linschoten’s account of a voyage to Portuguese East India was published in Dutch in 1596, and because of growing interest in the region it was translated immediately (1598) into English. Linschoten also published trade routes to India, and he was instrumental in opening up the region to the Netherlands and Britain. The words we take from him are trading terms (paan and supari, relating to the betel nut) and Kunbi, the name for a member of an Indian agricultural caste. The fifth and final term loaned from Hindi into English in the late sixteenth century is hing, better known by its older name asafoetida, a resin-like latex gum used as a spice in Indian cookery and medicine, and recorded in the journal of English merchant Ralph Fitch. Hing was a traders’ name for the product, used while it was being manhandled as a cargo on its way to Europe; the apothecaries and cooks in the West preferred the more familiar asafoetida. These few words do not represent a massive onslaught of vocabulary, but they were a straw in the wind.

  The pervasive intrusion of the British into India until Partition in 1947 and beyond, into Hinglish, meant that many other words—after this slow start—could permeate into English. The OED records just over 800 of them from Hindi. That surprised me—I only knew the more long-standing expressions, not those which meant so much to the early history of the British in India, but have faded from our memories. The wealth of borrowing from other Indian languages surprised me, too: 80 words from Bengali, 25 from Gujarati, 61 from Marathi, 49 from Panjabi—as well as the 550 from the formal, “official” language of Sanskrit. In the past it had not been possible to obtain the instant and panoramic view of these languages and their relationships with English that we could now access with the computerised data. We knew the significant words (jungle, Sikh, crore, rupee, Jain, raj, etc.), but there had been no easy way to find the minor players (war, the banyan tree; musseet, a mosque; jugger, a type of falcon—all at the bottom of the dictionary’s frequency list of Hindi borrowings); and yet these minor players need to be examined before we can speak confidently and precisely about this and other comparable areas of language and social interaction and development.

  While I was busy advising computer-science professors and teaching budding lexicographers, Hilary was hard at work with her 101 class on the English novel. She had essays to mark, and lessons to prepare, and new students to get to know. She remembers the term for four things (I am reliably informed): the first three were seeing her first-ever student wearing shorts; being challenged on a grade she awarded; and being laughed at for suggesting that
a meeting take place at “tea-time.” But she remembers that term principally for a banal sub-headline in the university magazine, the Waterloo Gazette.

  The editor of the Gazette had decided he would notify the university of our arrival through its columns, and to do so he wrote a sterling front-page piece on the new collaboration between Waterloo and Oxford, which included a few paragraphs about me and my role in the project. The problem arose when he generously decided to add a short section on what Hilary was teaching in the English Department, which he incautiously and patronisingly subheaded “Wife is Prof.” As you will appreciate, Hilary was a no-nonsense feminist; back home, my former chief editor, Bob Burchfield, had whispered to me one day that she was the only dictionary “partner” of whom he was seriously in awe, so heaven knows how the editor of the Waterloo Gazette was about to feel. Hilary seethed, and wrote sharp letters to the editor of the Gazette decrying the sexist undertones of the passage. He, in true journalist style, hid behind the fact that it was the truth—she was my wife, and she was a professor. When the hue and cry had died down, we wore T-shirts printed with “Wife is Prof” emblazoned across the front.

  Hue is a fossil nowadays. That means that it doesn’t have a life of its own anymore, and is only found in set phrases which we just repeat with little concept of their original meaning. It’s not unusual for a word to become fossilised: sadly, it’s one of the ways we retain the shape of the past while forgetting its content (you might compare beck in beck and call). Hue did once have a meaning, as you would expect. You need to travel back to the time when the Normans and their descendants ran England after the Conquest. Law was transacted in Anglo-Norman French, and those French had an expression hu e cri, which meant (according to the OED): “Outcry calling for the pursuit of a felon, raised by the party aggrieved, by a constable, etc.” But when the English used it, they altered the Anglo-Norman French into the more English-looking hue and cry. They’d know cry, and would understand it as a frantic shout after a criminal who was in the process of legging it, and at the time they’d even know what hue meant (much the same, in fact). By the mid-seventeenth century, this meaning of hue had effectively faded from the language, but the English still went on using it—fossilised—in the expression hue and cry. Their descendants were so puzzled by this phrase in the seventeenth century that they even thought it might be one word, or perhaps hewing cry. It’s an instructive example of what happens as a word turns into a fossil.