Editorial

Editorial This issue of Dictionaries is dedicated to the memory of Allen Walker Read, one of a few monumentally influential writers on American English and the history of lexicography in the 20th century, a founding member and Fellow of the Dictionary Society of America, and a notably generous scholar whose habits of mind and social temperament amply illustrated the term collégial. Many of us miss him individually ; all of us miss him professionally. Luckily for those of us who survive him, Read bequeathed a perennially important body ofwork. We can find his incomparable contributions to the history of English piecemeal, in every significantjournal of language studies, though recently several of his onomastic studies have been collected in America: Naming the Country and Its People, edited by Leonard R. N. Ashley (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2001), while more general studies, including his definitive articles on O.K., the ultimate Americanism , have been collected in Mikstones in the History ofAmerican English , edited by Richard W Bailey (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002) . Read's preoccupation with lexicography began early in his career : while a graduate student at the University of Iowa, he took a course from Thomas A. Knott, soon to be Editor of Webster's New InternationalDictionary oftheEnglish Language, SecondEdition (1934) and Editor -in-Chief of the MiddleEnglish Dictionary (from 1935-1944) . After a sojourn as a Rhodes Scholar, he accepted a position with the Dictionary ofAmerican English and was responsible for much of the first volume of that four-volume work. He left it under the aegis of a Guggenheim Fellowship to compile a "Dictionary of Briticisms," material for which he collected throughout his life, though he never completed the project; he passed along his files toJohn Algeo, another Fellow of this Society, who will no doubt finally bring Read's life-work to fruition. Read's serious study of lexicography began with his Oxford University B.Litt, dissertation, "The Place of Johnson's Dictionary in the History of Lexicography" (1933) . Subsequently, he wrote many significant articles on the subject. I list here those I have on hand, either in books or as photocopies, as a sample of his contribution: "The Scope of the American Dictionary," American Speech 8 (1933): 22-36; "Projected American Dictionaries, 1755-1828," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 36 (1937): 188-205 and 347-366; "The Labeling of National and Regional Variation in Popular vi¡iEditorial Dictionaries," InternationalJournal ofAmerican Linguistics 28 (1962): 217-227; " 'Webster's Third New International Dictionary: A Symposiun" QuarterlyJournal of Speech 48 (1962): 431-440; "Approaches to Lexicography and Semantics," Current Trends in Linguistics 10 (1973): 145-205; "The Segmenting of Meaning in Lexicographical Practice," Linguistics 105 (1973): 106-133; "The Social Impact of Dictionaries in the United States," in Lexicography in English, edited by Raven I. McDavid, Jr. and Audrey R. Duckert, 69-73 (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1973) ; "The War of the Dictionaries in the Middle West," in Papers on Lexicography in Honor of Warren N. Cordell, edited by James E. Congleton, John Edward Gates, and Donald Hobar, 3-15 (Terre Haute, IN: Dictionary Society of North America, 1979); "The Theoretical Basis for Determining Pronunciations in Dictionaries ," Dictionaries 4 (1982): 87-96; "Dictionaries and Proprietary Names: Summary of Testimony of Allen Walker Read," Dictionaries 6 (1984): 60-65; "Competing Lexicographical Traditions in America," in The History ofLexicography: Papers from the Dictionary Research Seminar at Exeter, March 1986, edited by R. R. K. Hartmann , 197-206 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986); "Craigie, Mathews, and Watson: New Light on the Dictionary of American English,"Dictionaries % (1986): 160-163; "The History of Lexicography," in Lexicography: An EmergingProfession , edited by Robert Ilson, 28-50 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986). And Read consistently, usefully extended his scholarship into the public arena, as in the following articles: "Desk Dictionaries," ConsumerReports 28 (1963): 547-550; "That Dictionary or the Dictionary," Consumer Reports 28 (1963): 488-492; "The Smaller Dictionaries," Consumer Reports 29 (1964): 97 and 145-147; "Noah Webster," Encyclopedia Americana 28 (1966): 561-562; "Dictionary," The New Encyclopedia Britannica: Micropcedia 5 (1974): 713-722. Editorialix This list merely suggests the breadth and significance of Read's contributions to lexicography, for those hitherto unfamiliar with them...