When it comes to reference books like the dictionary, many think of them as having the final - if you'll pardon the pun - word. They sit there on our desks, helping us spell correctly, making the call in Scrabble. It can be hard for modern people to remember that such books have creators, compilers, keepers of the knowledge.
But they do. And as we see in The First English Dictionary - just published by the Bodleian Library at Oxford University - dictionary editors can be pretty interesting people.
Most people think of Samuel Johnson's as the first dictionary in our language. But a man named Robert Cawdrey put one together nearly 150 years earlier, in 1604. Cawdrey was an Anglican priest - eventually defrocked for not conforming to all the doctrines of the mainstream church - who preached to the everyday folks in his parish. He made A Table Alphabeticall to define "hard usual" words for an ordinary but increasingly literate public.
Cawdrey's text, which has more than 2,500 words with brief and sometimes quirky definitions, is now available after being out of print for 350 years. John Simpson, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, edited the volume and wrote its enlightening and entertaining introduction. Here he is on the real first English dictionary, in an interview conducted by e-mail.
Question: Why doesn't the average person know about Cawdrey's dictionary, whereas Johnson is widely known for his?
Answer: You're right. Ask a hundred people today, and you'll be lucky if one of them has heard of Cawdrey.
Well, first, his dictionary was only produced in small numbers (we think). We don't know the print run of any of his four editions, but very few examples of his dictionary still survive. There's only one known copy of the first edition of 1604, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Secondly, his immediate successors in the dictionary business were intent on pushing their own books, and so didn't refer back to Cawdrey. They wanted their own productions to take all the limelight. Thirdly, Cawdrey's is only a small dictionary: around 2,500 words. By the end of the 17th century dictionaries had become much bigger. Poor old Cawdrey's dictionary started a trend, but lapsed into obscurity as it was overtaken in popularity by others.
By the time Samuel Johnson's dictionary was published in 1755, dictionaries weren't unusual anymore.
Johnson himself was coming to be known as a writer, and his definitions are much more accomplished than were Cawdrey's. Johnson's dictionary was large (two folio volumes), and remained in print throughout the 19th century in abridged versions. Johnson's dictionary was part of the culture when Cawdrey's dictionary was "rediscovered" by scholars in the 19th century. But without Cawdrey, would Johnson's dictionary ever have been compiled?
We still use Cawdrey's dictionary in revising the Oxford English Dictionary. Some of the words he includes aren't recorded earlier in English. But the reason I decided to bring out this edition was to celebrate a landmark in dictionary-writing. Here was a book which gives an insight into the lives of ordinary people around 1600: their concerns about their language, and the curious vocabulary they might encounter.
But it was also a book in which the seeds of modern lexicographical style can be seen quite clearly. We can add to that the strange story of Cawdrey himself, defrocked from the clergy for not following "the rules." It's a story which is worth telling!
Q. You point out that Cawdrey himself uses two variations of the spelling of the word word in one sentence. How standardized was spelling at this time?
A: Spelling wasn't standardized in the early 17th century. This isn't surprising, as there were no "authorities." Here are two of the words Cawdrey included in his dictionary: malapert and pirate. The Oxford English Dictionary records 12 different spellings of malapert in the 17th century and eight of pirate. The OED lists 21 17th-century forms for measles! So there was enormous variation. As for Cawdrey's two spellings of word on his title page: Maybe he gave the printer both spellings, or maybe the printer introduced the variant. Both - word and worde - were common at the time.
A couple of other quirks of spelling can be seen in his dictionary. There are no entries beginning with the letters j or u. In the style of the time, j-words were spelled with an i at the beginning (iudiciall), and u-words with a v (vlcer). U was used inside a word, but not at the start (as in iudiciall).
As you can see, variation in spelling didn't concern people as much as it does today. Standardization came later. By the mid-18th century English spelling had largely settled down.
Q. One thing that really struck me was the part of Cawdrey's introduction in which he tells readers they should learn the alphabet. How was the alphabet used at this time?
A. The alphabet was learned at school, but you have to realize that education wasn't anything like as accessible as it is today. Ordinary people might not have any particular need to know the alphabet. Cawdrey had been a schoolmaster, and was keen to see basic education extended - not least so that people could read the Bible. So he encourages people to make sure they know the alphabet so that they can use his dictionary efficiently. Once they know the alphabet, they need to appreciate the finer points of alphabetical order: ab precedes ac; abe precedes abf; etc.
Scholars were well aware of alphabetical ordering, but not everyone was a scholar. The bilingual dictionaries (e.g., Latin-English) which preceded Cawdrey in the 16th century typically used alphabetical ordering, but some preferred to order words by categories, in short nonalphabetical lists.
Don't forget this was the dawn of the English dictionary, so people had to be shown how to use this new type of book!
Q. You write in your introduction that Cawdrey compiled his dictionary during an interesting time for the English language. What was happening at this time that affected the language?
A. What was happening to English around 1600?
Lots. Printing had only been invented 130 years earlier, and a "book" culture took a while to develop.
In the late 16th century English was developing a sense of its own identity. It was becoming a more confident language. It was the time of Shakespeare, Nashe, Sir Philip Sidney. They (and others) were experimenting with the boundaries of English.
It was a time of great creativity in the language. New words stormed in, from the pens of writers of course, but also from the mouths of travellers who were sailing abroad for trade and excitement, and bringing back words they had encountered on their journeys.
The time was ripe for a dictionary which could explain some of this newfangled vocabulary to the common reader.