A NEW ENGLISH DICTIONARY.*
SINCE the Philological Society's great dictionary (the Ox- ford) was begun in earnest some fifteen years ago, lexico- graphers have enjoyed a busy time. Of English dictionaries of importance there have been published in this country, within the intervening period, the Encyclopxdic, the Inter- national Webster, a new edition of the Imperial, and Skeat's Etymological Dictionary ; while our cousins over the water have recently sent us the Century, and now follow it up with the first of the two volumes which are to compose the Standard Dictionary. The publication of this book has
been heralded with much sounding of trumpets ; but we do not, of course, hold the compilers responsible for the mercantile exploitation of their work. In testing their achievements we shall keep our eye generally upon their claims as stated in the introduction, and more particularly upon the title-page, which tells us that the work is con- structed " upon original plane, designed to give, in com- plete and accurate statement, in the light of the most recent advances in knowledge, and in the readiest form for popular use, the meaning, orthography, pronunciation, and etymology of all the words and the idiomatic phrases in the speech and literature of the English-speaking peoples," —a sufficiently complete and ambitions programme, which the designers have gone a long way towards executing.
The present volume is a large quarto of xx. + 1,060 pages, and three columns to a page. The largest type is small ; the smallest is almost microscopic. The printing, nevertheless, is marvellously accurate; indeed, of the mistakes we have noted scarcely any are certainly the printer's. The calf binding is strong and handsome, without being stiff in the back. Easy reference is provided for by a set of thumb-notches down the fore-edge, leading successively to the pages on which the A-list, B-list, and so on, begin. Farther, the exact places of the several notches are indicated by corresponding capital letters printed exactly over the notches, not only along the covers, but also along one margin of every leaf, so that, without lifting the book, or even looking at the fore- edge, the consulter can at once pounce upon any section he may require. This ingenious arrangement saves much time, and is an example of the publishers' consideration for the purchaser they have specially in view,—namely, the busy man, or "average reader;" or, as the prospectus calls him, "the every-day man" Turning to the contents of the book, we first notice its claims to completeness in respect of the vocabulary. The two volumes are to give us about 280,000 words, or towards 60,000 more than the six volumes of the Century. But of this imposing number of words it is at once seen that many are such as have no claim whatever to a place in an English dictionary,—e.g., the Latin us, dupondius ; Old Norse use, 20sir ; Egyptian ate f; and the like ; besides mythical proper names (Eurydice, 0. N. He mdal, &c.), and uncanny-looking things (ihlang-ihlang, derasht fankwai, and what not) from all corners of the earth. Superfluity would be an error on the right side, only that here it seems to be purchased by the absence of many familiar native words and phrases,—broad- bean, concurrent (sentences), cushion (of bacon), one's last card, to "loom large in a fog," to "kill by inches," to "make a leg," a cat-in-a-pan ("I turned a cat-in-a-pan once more '" —Vicar of Bray); a key = a crib, or a book of answers (to sums, &c.), and especially fist = " hand-writing," a usage centuries old ("Scrivener : Look you on your owne ,fist."—Roister-Doister, iii., 5). Under Law, we find Grimm's Law, but not Verner's Law, which is equally im- portant; barleycorn, a bogus measure, occurs in two places, but barley-meal and barley-mow are nowhere; and under Brethren there is no mention of the Moravians. Very numerous, however, and generally well-handled, are the • A Standard Dictionary of the English Language. Vol. L (A-L). New York and London : Funk and Weimar Company. scientific terms of almost every department of knowledge. Numerous also are the foreign words and phrases frequently met with, unexplained, in the daily newspapers (chic, -73undes- rath, durbar, fin de siecle, &c., and even impi, but not induna) ; as well as the little tags of Latin and French that are so useful to those who know neither language (genius loci, au courant, &c. ; but where is copia verborum ?). Further, like the Oxford, the present dictionary gives shelter to a good many harmless gutter-snipes,—cove, kid, bobby, cuss, "cut your lucky," and others, including the participle (jigger'd) in the imprecation of Little Lord Fanntleroy's friend; but we miss a number of familiar and equally harmless specimens of the breed), as Meg's diversions, my eye ! (= mihi ?), and " to be off -one's chump."
Two subdivisions of the vocabulary call for special mention. The first is that comprising handicraft terms, which, it is said, "have been gathered with great completeness." On this feature the editor, in his introduction, waxes eloquent ; he even drops into rhythm and rhyme, and very nearly into metre :--" As clamorous labor' [he remarks] I is knocking for recognition as never before, with its hundred hands' at almost every door, it is not strange that it is demanding
. . . . a much fuller recognition of its vocabulary" in dictionaries. (The editor will forgive us for measuring off his prose so as to bring out its full force and beauty.) But -alas for us ! the first word we wanted—namely, the often-used foredge or " fore-edge" (of a book)—is absent. The other subdivision comprises Americanisms, in which, naturally enough, the book is rich. Most of these consist of good old English material (hardshell, copperhead, to gum = " to cheat," &c.), but many are Americanisms simply because they have died out of general use in England. An interesting specimen of this class is the idiom to pass upon, which occurs three or four times in the introduction and prospectuses. Certain committees, it is said, have undertaken to pass upon words with which they severally have a special familiarity. The idiom is generally explained by an ellipsis,—" to pass [judg- ment or sentence] upon." To our mind, its earlier uses rather savour of old-time rapier-play. Says Bobadil : "O, out of measure ill ! A well-experienced hand would pass upon you at pleasure?' Matthew : " How mean you, sir, pass upon me "—Bob. : "Why, thus, sir,—make a thrust at me,
make a full career at the body; a most desperate
thrust, believe it." Compare Sing Lear, M., 7.
But the word-list of a dictionary is merely its skeleton; its flesh and blood, so far as it has any, are supplied by the exposi- tory apparatus. In the Standard Dictionary, the definitions are generally clear and precise ; but some of the scientific, and especially the zoological, ones will press hard on the "every- day man." Here is a very bad one :—" Sacred ape : any semnopithecine monkey " ; and the following needs a lot of translation into English :—"Dugong : an aquatic herbivorous halicoroid sirenian mammal." But the said man gets his turn in the order in which the meanings, when a word has more than one, are arranged. The commonest meanings are given first; the original ones either last or in an intermediate position. Thus, atlas is first defined as " a volume of maps," and bead as "a little perforated sphere," &c. Unless the oldest meaning chances to be also the commonest, this illogical order prevents the student from following up what A. Darmesteter calls the rayonnement and the enchainment of meanings. Most of the definitions are well up to the present state of knowledge or discussion,—that of better- ment, for example; but some are wrong or out of date. Thus, an accordion is not " known in England as a harmonium.," and Professor Sayce has shown that Dagon was an agricultural deity, and not a "fish-god," as he (or it ?) is here called. Other definitions are correct for America, but not for England,—e.g., bantam, "one of the breeds of the domestic hen ;" and so brahma, cochin, &c. ; for hen, over yonder, denotes a domestic fowl irrespective of sex.
The definitions proper are supported, wherever desirable, by various subordinate means of elucidation; and firstly, in the case of the more pregnant words, by collections of synonyms and antonyms, the former of which are carefully discriminated from one another. Then there are thousands of small wood- cuts up and down the text, which save a good deal of verbal description. There are also several whole pages of cuts a few beautiful single-leaf coloured engravings, and two or three double-leaf ones; bat the best illustration of all, to our
taste, is the whole-page photogravure, giving prints of thirty-six of the most interesting coins of antiquity, which is accompanied by three columns of descriptions, and by a list (above four columns) of coins of account of all the peoples of the world. Next come the illustrative quotations; but here the editors have exercised severe restraint. " Scores of thousands " of volumes have been read by the " five hun- dred readers," but only fifty thousand excerpts are to be used. In making the selection, although our great writers of the past are not forgotten, preference has been given to modern authors, sometimes tenth-rate ones, with the object of making the dictionary represent English as now actually used. In the case of literary words, however, it has some- times seemed to us that an older example might with advan- tage have been substituted for the one given; as, e.g., under incarnadine, the classic passage from Macbeth for the strained imitation of it by Mrs. Browning. We need only add, under this head, that many of the words are treated after the manner of an encyclopaedia, but in a very compressed style. Either short summaries (and these are uncommonly well done) are given of the main features or fundamental principles of a subject, as under epic, copyright, inductive method, &c. ; or, under specific or collective terms, full tabulations of the constituent varieties or individuals. Thus, under apple, there is a table of above three hundred varieties; and under element there is a tabulation showing all the known chemical ele- ments, with their symbols, atomic weights, and many other particulars.
In the important department of Etymology we do not always find the "careful attention" to "form and fulness," and to "the needs of the student," which the introduction leads us to expect. Words like abdomen, aqua, aurora are dismissed with (L.) Very many of the so-called derivations are no derivations at all. To tell us, and tell us nothing else, that our bed, horn, lamb, and the like, are derived from the Anglo-Saxon bed, horn, lamb, &c., is like asserting that an old man is his own grandson; the several pairs of words are absolutely one and the same word. Often, where the forms differ, the sound is unchanged ; as in back for bmc, feather for feller, &c.,—we moderns having merely spoilt the spelling. The case is pretty nearly the same with borrowed words ; there is no etymology, for example, in the information that we get accept and difference from the French accept-er and difference ; and that the French, in turn, gets these from the Latin accept-are and differentia : the French has merely appropriated the words bodily from the Latin and fitted them into its grammatical system; and the English has repeated the process. In contrast to the generally bald treat- ment of our native words, many of which are etymologically of great interest, we occasionally find one more liberally treated, as bee ; and here we are even landed at last in a primi- tive root, which, however, happens to be doubtful. But in many instances, where a related language is brought in, the comparison will seem to the uninitiated improbable for want of the missing links; as in the case of ear by the Gothic ausO, or of its homophone ear (of corn, &c.), by the Gothic ahs, or of A.S. e6 (under island) by the Latin aqua, or of east, under which we are referred, in illustration of its etymology, to aurora (see above). Errors in this depart- ment are rare ; for the compilers have had before them the work of predecessors. It is not difficult, by-the-bye, to see how far they have been able to use the Oxford. It is clear that the latter part of Vol. II. was not in their hands ; for they repeat a very doubtful derivation of curmudgeon, and, as used to be generally done, they make (by quotation) country- dance to be a perversion of the French contre-dance; whereas the Oxford shows that it is the French which is a perversion of the English. But we quit this subject with the remark that what appears to have been wanting was some single controlling authority which should treat etymology on a uniform and harmonious plan, giving every word its proper share of attention, no more and no less.
We must leave unnoticed questions of spelling, pronuncia- tion, and accentuation, as well as a praiseworthy attempt to reduce the hyphening and compounding of words to a rational system. In conclusion, we add that although, as we have seen, this dictionary is not without faults of excess, of defect, and of inconsistency, besides some positive mistakes, yet the sum-total of these is small beside the prodigious quantity of matter in the book, and will not appreciably diminish its usefulness to the " average reader."
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