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  • Editorial
  • Edward Finegan

With this issue, Dictionaries: The Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America celebrates its 35th anniversary. To mark the occasion, former DSNA president David Jost has crafted a history of the journal through lenses that highlight significant facets of dictionaries and lexicography: scope, sources, headwords, defining, pronunciation, etymology, usage, and synonyms, as well as art, technology, audience, personnel, and lexicography as a subject. A few years senior to the journal, DSNA itself warrants a history, and in this issue Michael Adams, the society’s current president, contributes the first of a two-part retrospective.

Reflecting a blend of old and new, paper and pixel, face-to-face elicitation of data and the mining of multibillion-word corpora, this issue contains articles that treat lexicography in languages of the Altaic, Austronesian, and Indo-European language families. If multimillion-word corpora kindled new ambitions for lexicography only a few decades ago, widespread access to the Internet has fueled a second revolution, altering the ways in which users engage with dictionaries and making it possible to study those ways and thus help transform how dictionaries are imagined. In a recent symposium, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski joined former Houghton Mifflin vice president and director of electronic development David Jost and lexicographer and Wall Street Journal columnist Ben Zimmer to explore quite disparate aspects of digital lexicography. Michael Hancher organized the symposium and introduces the three papers in this issue, and Lisa Berglund offers a literary and practical coda to the discussion.

In 1979, in the first issue of this journal, Gabriele Stein contributed an article on “The Best of British and American Lexicography” and a decade later contributed another on “Word-Formation in Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.” In this issue, Stein’s new book on [End Page ix] the sixteenth-century lexicography of Sir Thomas Elyot is reviewed by Marjorie Rubright, while Johnson’s “hidden acts of lexicography” in his editions of the works of Sir Thomas Browne and Roger Ascham are analyzed by Robert DeMaria, Jr.

As early as the journal’s second issue, the question of Shakespeare’s contribution to English was touched on—how many and which words did he coin? In the current issue, Ammon Shea revisits the question and offers a fresh assessment in light of new online sources and a parsing of what should and should not count as coining. Neology is central as well to Kevin Rottet’s analysis of how English–Breton dictionaries address onomasiological gaps in a cultural environment where lexicographers of Breton face the competing authenticities of Welsh and French lexical sources. For another Celtic language, Pádraig Ó Mianáin and Cathal Convery describe the development of the New English–Irish Dictionary, launched in an Ireland at peace since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 but not without competing linguistic preferences. In circumstances different from those of Brittany and Ireland, speakers of Chamorro in the Mariana Islands are revising a dictionary of their threatened language through energetic community efforts, and they are reaping expected lexicographic and unexpected social benefits, as Sandra Chung and Elizabeth Diaz Rechebei report.

In an article on Manchu lexicography, Mårten Söderblom Saarela analyzes preferences for organizing dictionaries during the Qīng dynasty, when graphological considerations proved less problematic than phonological ones, in part for social reasons. Also in this issue Stefan Dollinger and Bing Li review a new and comprehensive Manchu–English dictionary.

Connections between social and cultural identity, on the one hand, and lexicography on the other are patent in several contributions, perhaps most strikingly in the contrast between the traditional view of early English-language lexicography—as intended for the benefit and help of ladies, gentlewomen, and any other unskillful persons (to paraphrase Robert Cawdrey ever so slightly)—and the view presented here by Lindsay Rose Russell, who reconstructs the influence of four women on early modern bilingual dictionaries, three of which preceded Cawdrey’s 1604 Table Alphabeticall.

Sources of knowledge about lexical variation across geographical regions link several contributions to the anniversary issue. Javier Ruano-García traces the influence of the seventeenth-century Glossarium Brigantinum on the twentieth-century English Dialect Dictionary. Paul...

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