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A.P. Cowie (Editor). The Oxford History of English Lexicography. Volume I: General-purpose Dictionaries. Volume II: Specialized Dictionaries

Paper · 2011 · Loránd-Levente Pálfi

Summary

This is a critical review by Loránd-Levente Pálfi of A.P. Cowie's two-volume The Oxford History of English Lexicography (OUP, 2009). Volume I covers general-purpose dictionaries and Volume II covers specialized ones. The collection is broad. It treats dictionaries of British English and also of Scots, American, Australian, Canadian, Indian, New Zealand and South African English, and Caribbean Creoles.

The reviewer outlines the structure of both volumes and lists the contributors and their topics. He praises the chapters on the period after 1700, such as those on Johnson, Webster and the OED. He then raises several weaknesses:

  • The pre-1800 era gets too little space.
  • Early chapters vary in quality.
  • Including a whole Russian–English chapter seems odd.
  • Terminology is inconsistent across authors.
  • There is no shared theory of lexicography or of how history should be written.
  • There is no editorial epilogue.
  • The indexes are too small and have many gaps.

His verdict is that the work is invaluable for dictionary historians. Its anthology format, however, trades coherence for speed and expert accuracy, and its weak indexing hides much of what it contains.

Key points

  • Volume I has 15 contributions plus a 14-page introduction, and Volume II has 17 contributions plus a 21-page introduction. The set costs £140.
  • About 100 pages cover roughly 700–1800, while about 300 pages cover the 19th and 20th centuries. The reviewer links this to a wider modern bias, citing recent Danish histories of literature and of Denmark.
  • Volume I alone uses at least seven terms for "lemma": lemma, headword, word-heading, entry, entry word, word, and term.
  • Both indexes are exactly 17 pages. That is about 4% of Volume I's text and 3.5% of Volume II's.
  • Items mentioned in the text but missing from the index include:
    • Verrius Flaccus and his Libri de significatu verborum
    • Isidore's Etymologiae
    • John Garland's Synonyma
    • Afrikaans
    • the Patriot woordeboek and its author S.J. du Toit
  • The reviewer separates three approaches to writing history: positivist accumulation that assumes steady progress, selective storytelling, and critical selection with evaluation. He argues that lexicography has not improved monotonically, and that Enlightenment-era work was in some respects never surpassed.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. When many authors write about one domain, the vocabulary for even core concepts drifts unless a single canonical term per concept is enforced; this is worth auditing in any multi-author or multi-module system.
  • I2. Information that cannot be found again is effectively lost, so an index's size and depth should match how dense the content is.
  • I3. The reviewer tests the index by sampling concrete items from specific pages and checking whether they can be looked up, which turns a vague quality claim into a spot-checkable audit.
  • I4. An anthology of experts is fast and accurate in detail but lacks cohesion; an editorial synthesis layer is needed to reconcile assumptions across contributors.
  • I5. Progress is not necessarily monotonic: older work can beat newer work in some respects, so history should be read critically rather than as a steady climb.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): Define one canonical name for lemma/headword-like notions across crate en and its consumers, and lint code and docs for synonyms that blur the distinction.
  • I2 (world): Measure what share of entities mentioned in a text actually become retrievable nodes in the world model or knowledge graph, and treat unindexed mentions as coverage failures.
  • I3 (answer): Build QA checks by sampling facts stated in a fable or text and verifying the reader can retrieve each one, giving a cheap recall audit of comprehension.
  • I4 (learn): When several witness parsers or LLM teachers produce silver data, add an explicit reconciliation step with shared guidelines rather than trusting each source's local conventions.
  • I5 (learn): Keep older model and rule versions as evaluation baselines and check per-phenomenon regressions, not just overall score gains.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Loránd-Levente Pálfi. 2011. A.P. Cowie (Editor). The Oxford History of English Lexicography. Volume I: General-purpose Dictionaries. Volume II: Specialized Dictionaries. Lexikos 19.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5788/19–453

@inproceedings{palfi2011p,
  title = {{A.P. Cowie (Editor). The Oxford History of English Lexicography. Volume I: General-purpose Dictionaries. Volume II: Specialized Dictionaries}},
  author = {Loránd-Levente Pálfi},
  booktitle = {Lexikos 19},
  year = {2011},
  doi = {10.5788/19--453},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5788/19--453}
}

References

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