ABSTRACT
Henry Cockeram's English Dictionarie (1623) is the third oldest dictionary of English, following Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabetical/ (1604) and John Bullokar's English Expositor (1616). Cockeram's Dictionarie is comprised of three parts, the "First Part of the English Dictionary" being for interpreting hard words and the "Second Part of the English Translator" for providing the readers with information on how "vulgar" words and phrases can be replaced by "refined" terms; the third part need not concern us here. According to Cockeram,
With this recognition in mind, I will, in my presentation, investigate entries in the "Second Part" whose head-phrases are related to verbs of high frequency. When browsing through the "Second Part", we can notice how much Cockeram was interested in the use of such verbs. For instance, he provided 27 entries in succession whose head-phrases include the infinitive and inflected forms of take, such as "to Take out", "to Take away", "to Take, or drawe from another thing", "a Taking by the high way" and "a Taking out of'. I will argue that in constructing these entries, he hardly referred to John Rider's Bibliotheca Scholastica (1589) or any similar dictionary, though the Bibliotheca has usually been thought to be an essential reference book for Cockeram to compile the "Second Part".
