Regional Dialect Labels in Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionaries

Regional Dialect Labels in Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionaries David K. Barnhart The first dialect dictionary in English is generally attributed toJohn Ray (1674), the father of English natural history and the person largely responsible for the establishment ofan early system for the classification ofplants, adopting the flower as the basis for classifying them into genera and species. Elisha Coles (1676) follows Phillips (1658) in the general vocabulary and in the entry of proper names; he departs from the conventional in including canting terms and dialectal words. These appear in the general list in alphabetical order and are designated by abbreviations explained by Coles in his introduction (Starnes and Noyes 1946, 60). Coles appears to have been the first lexicographer to have "deliberately chosen to introduce them into a general dictionary" (Starnes and Noyes 1946, 63). Noah Webster recognized and identified dialects in his An American Dictionary oftheEnglish Language (1828), as at clever: clever, a. — 3. In New England, good-natured, possessing an agreeable mind or disposition. In Great Britain, this word is applied to the body or its movements, in its literal sense .... In New England, a clever man is a man of pleasing, obliging disposition .... It is a colloquial word but sometimes found in respectable writing. This usage may be what SamuelJohnson reported in his great dictionary as: " ... [4.] This is a low word, scarcely ever used but in burlesque or conversation; and applied to any thing a man likes, without a settled meaning." In his dictionary of 1846, Joseph E. Worcester reported essentially the same information as had Webster some 20 years earlier. In Dialect Labels in Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionaries139 the 1888 edition of Worcester's abridgment of that earlier work, clever, in the sense of "obliging," is labeled "[U.S.]." Nuttall's Standard Dictionary (1891) also labels it U.S. The 1867 edition of A Common-School Dictionary of the English Language, while entering the term clever, together with the meaning cited above, did not label that meaning as regional in any way. Indeed, very few school dictionaries of the 19th century indicated dialect: in consulting dictionaries for school children compiled before the turn of the century — Turner's The School Dictionary (1829), Cobb's (1846), and adaptations of Walker's (1839) dictionary for schools — I find that the editors did not concern themselves with dialect. Turner (1829) in his preface says nothing about it: The study of the dictionary as of late is much neglected in schools. This may have arisen in part from the fact that no dictionary could be obtained, adapted to the wants of schools but the principal reason undoubtedly is this; the system of teaching which prevails in our common schools is fundamentally wrong .... The attention of both teacher and scholar is exclusively confined to letters, words, and sounds; of course ideas are neither communicated or received. Defining, is an exercise rarely attempted in common schools and the dictionary is banished from the school-house .... However, both Webster's Academic Dictionary (1895) and Webster's Secondary School Dictionary (1925) enter clever meaning "obliging" and label it "Dial, or Colloq." The early Thorndike-Barnhart dictionaries were originally entitled Thorndike Century Dictionaries and were intended as a school series. Later the series was to include The Thorndike-Barnhart Comprehensive Desk Dictionary and was ultimately capped by the World Book Encycbpedia Dictionary (first published in 1963); both were direct outgrowths of the Century tradition. This tradition can find some connection to Ogilvie's The Imperial Dictionary (1850). Roswell Smith, President of the Century Co., had suggested a project that would incorporate a dictionary as described in William Dwight Whitney's (1889) preface, to be "serviceable for every literary and practical use; a more complete collection of the technical terms ... ; and the addition to the definitions proper of such related encyclopedic matter with pictorial illustrations as shall constitute a convenient book for general reference " (see Bailey, 1996). And, more specific to the following discussion , Whitney states the importance of considering the inclusion of dialect terms: 140David K. Barnhart The first duty of a comprehensive dictionary is collection, not selection. When a full account of the language is sought, every omission of a genuine English form, even when...