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Page 1 : THE ROMANES LECTURE 1900 The Evolution of English Lexicography BY JAMES A.H. MURRAY M.A., LL.D., D.C.L., PH.D. DELIVERED IN THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE, OXFORD, JUNE 22, 1900 THE EVOLUTION OF ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY When the 'Act to facilitate the provision of Allotments for the Labouring Classes' was before the House of Commons in 1887, a well-known member for a northern constituency asked the Minister who had charge of the measure for a definition of the term allotment, which occurred so often in the Bill. The Minister somewhat brusquely told his interrogator to 'look in the Dictionary,' at which there was, according to the newspapers, 'a laugh.' The member warmly protested that, being called upon to consider a measure dealing with things therein called 'Allotments', a term not known to English Law, nor explained in the Bill itself, he had a right to ask for a definition.

Page 4 : Learning and literature, science and art, had attained to fair proportions in England, and in the Old English tongue, when their progress was arrested by the Norman Conquest. The Norman Conquest brought to England law and organization, and welded the country into a political unity; but it overthrew Old English learning and literary culture. In literary culture the Normans were about as far behind the people whom they conquered as the Romans were when they made themselves masters of Greece; and it was not till some two generations after the Conquest, that learning and literature regained in England somewhat of the position which they had occupied two centuries earlier.

Page 7 : Baret's Alvearie of 1573 has been justly styled 'one of the most quaint and charming of all the early Dictionaries.' In his 'Prefatory Address to the Reader' the author tells, in fine Elizabethan prose, both how his book came into existence, and why he gave it its curious name:-- 'About eighteene yeeres agone, hauing pupils at Cambridge studious of the Latine tongue, I vsed them often to write Epistles and Theames together, and dailie to translate some peece of English into Latine, for the more speedie attaining of the same.

Page 10 : I suppose it is a truism, that the higher position now taken by English studies, is intimately interwoven with the advances which have been made during the last quarter of a century in the higher education of women, and that but for the movement to let women share in the advantages of a university education, it is doubtful whether the nineteenth century would have witnessed the establishment of a School of English Language and Literature at Oxford. In connexion with this it is a noteworthy fact, that the preparation of these early seventeenth century English dictionaries was also largely due to a consideration of the educational wants of women. The 'Table Alphabeticall' of Robert Cawdrey, which was dedicated to five 'right honourable, Worshipfull, vertuous, and godlie Ladies[9],' the sisters of his former pupil, Sir James Harrington, Knight, bears on its title-page that it is 'gathered for the benefit and help of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons.

Page 13 : Only where he had no quotations did Johnson insert words from Bailey's folio, or other source, with Dict. as the authority. The literary quotations were entirely supplied by himself from his capacious memory, or from books specially perused and marked by him for extraction. When he first began his work in the room in Gough Square, his whole time was devoted to thus reading and marking books, from which six clerkly assistants copied the marked quotations. The fact that many of the quotations were inserted from memory without verification (a practice facilitated by Johnson's plan of merely naming the author, without specifying the particular work quoted, or giving any reference whereby the passage could be turned up) is undoubtedly the reason why many of the quotations are not verbally exact.

Page 16 : From this impulse arose the movement which, widened and directed by much practical experience, has culminated in the preparation of the Oxford English Dictionary, 'A new English Dictionary on Historical Principles, founded mainly on the materials collected by the Philological Society.' This dictionary superadds to all the features that have been successively evolved by the long chain of workers, the historical information which Dr. Trench desiderated.

Page 19 : None of these works embraces so long a period of the language, or is so strictly historical in method, as the New English Dictionary. Rather are they, like Littré's great Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, Dictionaries of the modern language, with the current words more or less historically treated.