Early Dictionaries of English and Historical Corpora

This paper discusses the implications for historical corpora of an examination of some early dictionaries of English. Comparison is made between Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and works such as Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656), Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum (1730), and Robert Ainsworth's influential Linguae Latinae Compendiarius (1736). The claim that early English-English dictionaries contained many "hard words", i.e. words, often from classical sources, which had infrequent or nil occurrence in the language at the time, is examined by checking the occurrence of such words in historical corpora. This leads to an examination of the corpora themselves and comparison with corpora of modern English. Suggestions are made about how historical corpora might be developed in future, for example by offering domain-specific search facilities. Reference will be made to A dictionary of the English language on CD-ROM : the first and fourth editions, Samuel Johnson, edited by Anne McDermott (Cambridge : CUP in association with the University of Birmingham, 1996).