ABSTRACT
The history of the English dictionary has been thoroughly explored in several works (see, for example, Starnes and Noyes, 1946/1991; McArthur, 1986; Green, 1996). Green’s study is both rich in textual and biographical detail and in its treatment of the social contexts in which the English dictionary has developed; McArthur’s work is particularly valuable in that it locates the history of the dictionary within the more general historical development of reference science. It is not my intention to provide a more detailed or authoritative version of this history in this book. Instead, I wish to focus on an issue that has yet to be adequately treated in histories of the dictionary: the relationship between the history of the English dictionary and the history of the English language. My argument will be that dictionaries have played a much greater role in the construction of the English language as an object of social and linguistic knowledge than is typically acknowledged. The history of the language is in many respects the history of the language as it has been represented in the form of the dictionary. The history of the English dictionary, I will argue, is thus the history of a particular form of representation in which interaction between content and structure is both conditioned by and productive of the discursive contexts in which it has developed.
