Laying the foundations for the first monolingual dictionaries of English, the sixteenth century in English lexicography is here shown to form a bridge between the glossarial compilations which had slowly evolved during the Middle Ages, and the more recognisably modern dictionary incorporating synonymy, illustrative citations and other standard features. The articles collected here treat general lexicography and dictionaries in this period, their uses, and the state of research in this field. The volume also covers a fascinating and diverse collection of lexicographers, from the well known - John Palsgrave, Thomas Cooper, Thomas Elyot and John Florio - to those about whom next to nothing is known - Richard Howlet, John Baret and Peter Levens.

This volume examines the ways in which Renaissance lexicographers selected, described, and analysed the lexicon. It explores the extent to which bi- and multilingual word lists and dictionaries in the 16th century are often pan-European in character, and discusses the increasing use of typography to present lexical information structure.

This is the first volume in the trilogy Dictionaries in the English-Speaking World, 1500-1800, which will offer a new history of lexicography in and beyond the early modern British Isles. The volume explores the dictionaries, wordlists, and glossaries that were compiled and read by speakers of English from the end of the Middle Ages to the year 1600. These include the first printed dictionaries in which English words were collected; the dictionaries of Latin used by all educated English-speakers, from young children to Shakespeare to adult royalty; the dictionaries of modern languages that gave English-speakers access to the languages and cultures of continental Europe; dictionaries and wordlists documenting other languages from Armenian to Malagasy to Welsh; and a great variety of specialized English wordlists. No unified history has ever surveyed this vast, lively, and culturally significant lexicographical output before. The guiding principle of the book, and the trilogy, is that a story about dictionaries must also be a story about human beings. John Considine offers a full and sympathetic account of those who compiled and used these works, and those who supported them financially, paying particular attention to records of dictionary use and its traces in surviving copies. The volume will appeal to all those interested in the languages and literary cultures of the sixteenth-century English-speaking world.

This work presents a collection of some 130 contributions covering a wide range of topics of interest to historical, theoretical and applied linguistics alike. A major theme is the development of English which is examined on several levels in the light of recent linguistic theory in various papers. The geographical dimension is also treated extensively with papers on controversial aspects of a variety of studies, as are topical linguistic matters from a more general perspective.