ABSTRACT
The story of early modem English lexicography is first and foremost a story of Latin dictionaries. As other contributions to this volume make clear, there were also flourishing traditions of specialized and non-specialized monolingual English-language lexicography, the former being older, and of bilingual lexicography outside the Latin tradition, which might be of French, Welsh, Spanish, Italian, Old English, Dutch, ancient Greek, Hebrew, or other European vernaculars or learned languages. The following note summarizes the varied texts in which seventeenth-century English lexicographers registered the vocabularies of the living languages of the world beyond Christian Europe. It is doubtless incomplete, partly because the word lists in question have not all been printed; partly because those that have been printed are scattered in larger works, from which it is not always easy to retrieve them (I have depended heavily on volume 14 of Alston's Bibliography of the English Language); and partly because they do not form a well-defined class. The last point can be illustrated by three questions. First, how many words need to be brought together to constitute a wordlist? Second, is a highly specialized list, for instance of the titles of courtiers in the Ottoman Empire, still a word list for the purposes of a sketch like the present one?1 Third, do the listed forms need to be set off typographically, for instance by printing each lexical item and its gloss in parallel columns? Incomplete as it may be, the summary does still give some sense of one of the most adventurous fields of inquiry explored by seventeenth-century Anglophone lexicographers.
