Oxford's Bodleian republishes 'First English Dictionary, 1604'

Longtime readers of Intellectual Affairs may recall that this column occasionally indulges in reference-book nerdery. So it was a pleasant but appropriate surprise when the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford provided a copy of its new edition of the very first dictionary of the English language. It has been out of print for almost 400 years, and the Bodleian is now home to the one known copy of it to have survived.

Available [May 1] as The First English Dictionary, 1604 (distributed by the University of Chicago Press), the work was originally published under the title A Table Alphabeticall. It was compiled in the late 16th century by one Robert Cawdrey. The book did not bring him fame or fortune, but it went through at least two revised editions within a decade. That suggests there must have been a market for Cawdrey’s guide to what the title page called the “hard usuall English wordes” that readers sometimes encountered “in Scripture, Sermons, or elswhere.”...

In his introductory essay, John Simpson [editor of the Oxford English Dictionary] points out that the OED now lists 60,000 words that are known to have been in use in English around the year 1600. Cawdrey defines about 2,500 of them. “We should probably assume that he was unable to include as many words as he would have liked,” writes Simpson, “in order to keep his book within bounds. It was, after all, an exploratory venture.”

But that makes the selection all the more interesting. It gives you a notion of what counted as a “hard word” at the time. Most of them are familiar now from ordinary usage, though not always in quite the sense that Cawdrey indicates. He gives the meaning of “decision” as “cutting away,” for example. Tones of the preacher can be heard in his slightly puzzling definition of “curiositie” as “picked diligence, greater carefulnes, then is seemly or necessarie.”

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U.Chicago Press 'First English Dictionary, 1604' press release