ABSTRACT
Thomas Spence (1750-1814) was born into a working-class family in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he was taught to read by his father. He went on to become a schoolteacher and a wellknown radical thinker and writer. His Grand Repository of the English Language (1775) is a pronouncing dictionary in which each entry is respelt in a phonetic script of Spence's own devising. This work was intended for "the laborious part of the people" who could not afford either the time of the expense of normal schooling, and who, Spence insisted, would learn to read more easily using his reformed spelling. Whilst other pronouncing dictionaries of this period (e.g. Walker 1791) aimed only to teach 'correct' pronunciation and so took over wholesale Johnson's words and definitions, Spence's Grand Repository, as the title suggests, set out to provide a complete guide to the English Language. Spence's pronunciation has been covered in detail elsewhere (Beal 1999). In this paper, I consider the sources of Spence's words, some of which are not found in Johnson, and of his definitions, some of which carry a radical message.
