Editorial

WITH THIS ISSUE, DICTIONARIES MOVES FROM AN ANNUAL TO A biannual publication schedule, a development the Society highlights with a new physical design. With biannual publication, the designation of our numbering system has changed: instead of a yearly "number," Dictionaries will be published in a single "volume" with two "issues" each year. To minimize possible confusion, last year's "Number 37" is succeeded by this year's "Volume 38." As you'll read in the current issue, internal and informal practice in earlier days of the Society referred sometimes to "volumes," other times to "numbers." Moving definitively to volumes and issues, the journal falls in line with nearly universal practice elsewhere.

More important, if less obvious, the masthead announces a significant expansion of the editorial team. With this volume, Orion Montoya and Sarah Ogilvie join the journal as associate editors. And with this issue, Wendalyn Nichols concludes her exceptional service as reviews editor. Starting with the second issue of the year, Traci Nagle assumes responsibility for reviews.

As for the contents of the present issue, former journal editor and DSNA president Michael Adams concludes his history of the Society's early years, with installments on more recent years promised for upcoming issues. Deep diving into the Society's archives enabled Adams to discern the complex beginnings of what, nearly 40 years after its founding, seems an inevitable fixture on the map of lexicographical organizations. His quoting from typed and handwritten notes between and among founders and early members conveys a tangible feel not only for early DSNA but for the kinds of challenges that need to be met when a learned society begins. Also in this issue, David Micklethwait reports his pursuit of a dictionary whose very existence had been doubted. His article is one of several contributions he has made to our understanding of mid-nineteenth-century American lexicography, and this article fills in certain previously missing details.

In Reference Works in Progress, readers will find three rich reports. Michael Montgomery and Jennifer Heinmiller describe the forthcoming Dictionary of Smoky Mountain and Southern Appalachian English, an enriched and expanded follow-on to the earlier Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English; their report exhibits sample entries from DSMSAE, including those for running-go and swarp. Readers are familiar with Green's Dictionary of Slang (reviewed in 2012), the most detailed work of its kind ever produced. Now Jonathon Green, the foremost lexicographer of English slang, has teamed up with database whiz David P. Kendal to mount the mammoth GDoS Online. Their report highlights certain technical challenges the project faced, the bottom-line interests of some publishing houses, quotidian vagaries that affect schedules in the life of scholar-entrepreneurs, and the financial inheritance that made GDoS possible. The third RWiP contribution originated at the 2017 DSNA biennial meeting in Barbados, where members of the LexiCon research group Antonio San Martín, Melania Cabezas-García, Miriam Buendía, Beatriz Sánchez-Cárdenas, Pilar León-Araúz, and group leader Pamela Faber presented several papers; here, they unify aspects of those presentations in a single report, offering a detailed portrait of EcoLexicon—a multilingual terminological knowledge base concerning the environment—and the riches available through its website.

In the book reviews section, Peter Gilliver's The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary is characterized as "magnificent" by George Goebel, current chief editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English. Lynda Mugglestone's Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words "presents the Dictionary in a rich context of Johnson's other writings," says reviewer John Considine, and he adds that anyone "who is going to read a single book on the Dictionary would do well to read this one." In the third review, Mary Clayton wonders, "Who would have imagined … a truly interesting book [about] the wanderings and adventures of Antonio de Nebrija's Spanish to Latin [1495] dictionary," and she deems Byron Hamann's The Translations of Nebrija as just such a book—for both the educated general reader and the specialist "who might want to learn more about Nebrija's lexical work and its relationship to the development of bilingual lexicography." [End Page viii...