TRENCH ON SORE DEFICIENCIES IN ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. * TILE turn of

Dean Trench towards philology has not only pro- duced several attractive books on words and. sentences, but bids • On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries : being the Substance of two Papers read before the Philological Society, November 5, and November 19, 1857. By Richard Chenevix Trench, D.D., Dean of Westminster. Published by Parker and Son.

fair to give us a dictionary such as the world has never yet seen, spite of French Academies and Italian Della Cruscans. If not solely yet in great measure by his exertions, a division of labour upon the grandest scale is applied to the English language. Books the best adapted to trace the age, authority, and meaning of words, are distributed among volunteers the most competent to deal with them. The results are to be transmitted to the Philo- logical Society ; the original idea being a supplement to existing and a help to future dictionaries ; but it seems likely to conduce to a new dictionary. At all events, the support the scheme has elicited is worthy of such a final result.

"Let me mention here, that seventy-six volunteers have already come forward, claiming their shares in this task. A hundred and twenty-one works of English authors, in most cases the whole works of each author, have been taken in hand by them ; and in evidence of the interest which the work inspires, I may add, that thirty-one contributions, many of them, I understand, of very high value have been already sent in. Any reader of these pages, who should feel value, to join in the work, address- ing a line to the Secretary of the Committee, Herbert Coleridge, Esq., 2 Stone Buildings Lincoln's Inn, *mild receive from him a list of books un- appropriated yet, and all other information he might require."

It was perhaps with reference to a new dictionary that Dean Trench delivered to the Philological Society these observations on some existing defects in our present dictionaries, which he has now revised and given to the press. The publication exhibits more than a classified account, illustrated by examples, of seven errors in scheme and numerous imperfections in execution to be found in existing dictionaries. It contains an exposition of what a real English dictionary should be in plan, with some hints as to the manner in which the plan should be carried out. Here is the general idea.

"A dictionary, then, according to that idea of it which seems to me alone capable of being logically maintained, is an inventory of the language : much more indeed, but this primarily, and with this only at present we will deal. It is no task of the maker of it to select the good words of a language. If he fancies that it is so, and begins to pick and choose, to leave this and to take that, he will at once go astray. The business which he has undertaken is to collect and arrange all the words, whether good or bad, whether they commend themselves to his judgment or otherwise, which, with certain ex- ceptions hereafter to be specified, those writing in the language have em- ployed. He is an historian of it, not a critic. * * * * The lexicographer 18 making an inventory ; that is his business : he may think of this article which he inserts in his catalogue, that it had better be consigned to the lum- ber-room with all speed, or of the other, that it only met its deserts when it was so consigned low, ago ; but his task is to make his inventory complete. Where he counts words to be needless, affected, pedantic, ill put together, contrary to the genius of the language, there is no objection to his saying so ; on the contrary, he may do real service in this way; but let their claim to belong to our book-language be the humblest, and he is bound to record them, to throw wide with an impartial hospitality his doors to them, as to all other. A dictionary is an historical monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view ; and the wrong ways into which a lan- guage has wandered, or attempted to wander, may be nearly as instructive as the right ones in which it has travelled : as much may be learned, or nearly as much, from its failures as its successes, from it follies as from its wisdom."

Considered as a national record of words undertaken by the elite of the nation's philologists, there is nothing to object to in this exposition. "Store is no sore " : there is no harm in seeing what a number of crabbed, uncouth, ill-looking and evil-sounding words, have been coined by writers when classical imitation was a fashion of the day,—though, speaking sensibly, it may be doubted whether the use of one word by one author should require, as

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the Dean maintains, its insertion n a dictionary; for a man may be very able, yet pedantic by habit or quaint by nature. For na- tional purposes, though not for national character, we should feel inclined to extend our author's definition of a dictionary to "an inventory of the language" in use ; leaving for a supplement ob- solete, temporary, (as it may be said,) and single words—words, that is, usedby single authors, and apparently never received even temporarily. No doubt, if you stop short of all, there is, as the Dean observes, great practical difficulty in drawing the line. Pope, possibly even Collins, may contain a word or two that requires explanation for the general reader ; Milton many words, Shah- spore a great .many: so that on what principle are you to go ? where are you stop ? The difficulty is felt in all similar under- takings—as in in annotation. The safe side is the full side, even when you have the Supplement of the Philological Society to fall back upon. At all events, to a supplement we thiak words such as most of the following should be relegated. "The maker, for example, of an English dictionary may not consider 'mulierosity,' or subsannation,' or coaxation,' or qudibundness,' or 'deli- nition,' or ' septemfluons,' or medioxumous,' or mirificent,' orpalmifer- ous,' or opime,' or a thousand other words of a similar character which might be adduced, (I take all these from a single work of Henry More,) to contribute much to the riches of the English tongue ; yet has he not there- fore any right to omit them, as all these which I have just adduced, with a thousand more of like kind, have been omitted from our dictionaries. I will not urge that one or two in this list might be really serviceable (` mulieros- ity,' for instance, expresses what no other word in the language would do) : but, admitting them to be purely pedantic, that they would be quite intolerable in use, still they involve and illustrate an important fact in the history of our language,—the endeavour to latinize it to a far greater extent than has actually been done, the refusal on its part to adopt more than a certain num- ber of these Latin candidates for admission into its ranks,—and, therefore, should not be omitted from the archives of the language."

Words like the above are mostly exotic experiments, plants that perished in transplanting. Obsolete words fall under an- other category, for they are units in the history of the tongue, and not the mere failures of innovators. Some of these, however, are extremely uncouth, and not likely to be restored to use. The following are taken from the part where the philologist properly dwells upon the difference between obsolete words and provincial- isms that should have no place in a dictionary, unless they were once national.

" "Spong ' is now a Suffolk, or it may be an East Anglian word. Halli- well deals with it as thus provincial, and rightly describes it as an irregu- lar, narrow, and projecting part of a field ' ; corresponding, therefore, very

nearly to the 'sling,' 'slang,' or of some of our Midland coun- ties. Our dictionaries know nothing of it ; nor should they take note of it on the score of its present provincial existence • but they should on the ground that it once had free course in our literary English, being often used by Fuller. Once more, take the verb to hazle.' lialltwell and Wright explain it rightly as 'the first process of drying washed linen,' and assign to it also East Anglia as the region where it is current : but it was once not East Anglian but English, as a noble passage, of which I cite a few words from a great but little-known divine, will prove. Then, once more, the verb to finite,' signifying to scare, to terrify, and standing in the same relation to 'flit' that fugare ' does to fugere '—this may be, as our glossaries tell us, a word of the North country now ; but it was a word of the whole country once, and as such should have found place not in our glossaries alone but in our dictionaries no less. To hopple,' (the word is not in Richardson,) Todd gives as a Northern word, and without example. Supposing he was right in saying so, he had no business to give

it at all i

: but he s not, for it is employed by Henry More. Dozzled ' our archaic glossaries assign to the Eastern Counties, and explain rightly as meaning. stupid, heavy : but we should not have to seek it, or at least to find it, only in them ; Bishop Racket employs it. I believe a corn-sieve is still called a 'try' in some parts of England, a small enclosure a pingle,' a pond apulke'• but the words had once nothing local about them, that they should be relegated to these collections ; and found only in them."

Unless practical considerations are disregarded altogether, number and space are elements of rejection or insertion. From the Dean's criticism on modern dictionaries it is probable that a work on the plan indicated would be less bulky (with the same au- thorities and quotations) than the lexicons we are now invited to buy.

Were it necessary that our dictionaries should grow considerably in bulk, through the taking in of much which hitherto they have not taken

in, I should acquiesce in the i necessity even while I felt the inconvenience. in But regard of most of them there s no such necessity. Let them throw overboard that which never had any claim to make part of their cargo, and they will find room enough for the more precious wares which they are spe- cially bound to convey.

"The most mischievous shape which this error assumes consists in the drafting into the dictionary a whole army of purely technical words, such as indeed are not for the most part, except by an abuse of language, words at all, but signs, having been deliberately invented as the nomenclature, and, so to speak, the algebraic notation of some special art or science, and having never passed the threshold of this nor mingled with the general fa- mily of words. It is not unfrequently a barren ostentation which induces the bringing in of these, that so there may be grounds for boasting of an immense addition made to the vocabulary. Such additions are very cheaply made. Nothing is easier than to turn to modern treatises on che- mistry or electricity, or on some other of the sciences which hardly or not at all existed half a century ago, or which, if they existed, have yet been in later times wholly new-named,—as botany, for example,—and to trans- plant from these new terms by the hundred and the thousand, with which to crowd and deform the pan-es of a dictionary, and then to boast of the vast increase of words which it has gained over its predecessors. The labour is little more than that of transcription • but the gain is nought, or indeed less than nought ; for it is not merely that half-a-dozen genume English words recovered from our old authors would be a greater gam, a more real advance toward the completion of our vocabulary than a hundred or a thousand of these ; but additions of this kind are mere disfigurements of the work which they profess to complete. Let such be reserved for a technological lexicon by themselves."

Here we break off, for our doubting difference with the author is exhausted ; all the rest would be agreement in opinion, and ad- miration of the knowledge and acumen brought to bear upon the subject. The tractate itself, moreover, is not very long or high- priced ; and it well deserves the attention of every one who feels an interest is his native language, not only for what the publica- tion does but for what it suggests.