"Cunning passages, contrived corridors": Unexpected essays in the history of lexicography (review)

The chapters comprising this volume originate in the biennial meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America, held in 2009 in Bloomington, Indiana. Not a conference proceedings by any measure, "Cunning passages, contrived corridors" contains a select group of essays that address historical lexicography through a fascinating array of lenses. Four essays treat the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which appeared several months after the conference, and these chapters, occurring in a separate section at the end of the volume, do not merely round it out with a less common object of analysis than dictionary conferences chiefly display: they enrich it with an important dimension to thinking about language and lexicography—namely, organizing words other than alphabetically.

Christian Kay's "Classification: Principles and Practices" offers a brief history of thesauruses (thesauri, if you prefer) beginning with Roget and examining ways in which thesaurus makers have organized their hyponymies. Based on the Oxford English Dictionary and supplemented by A Thesaurus of Old English (1995), HTOED reflects an inductive, lexicon-based approach to organizing a thesaurus. As Irené Wotherspoon reports in "The Making of The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary," M. L. Samuels originally proposed the historical thesaurus in 1964, with the aim of "revealing the information on semantic and social change which was locked up in the alphabetical arrangement of the dictionary" (271). Unlike the more abstract hierarchy of Roget and others, HTOED relies on "a modified folk taxonomy ... based on the world view revealed by the pre-scientific terminology of English, but modified by reference to more scientific taxonomies for certain domains [such as] plants and animals" (271). HTOED relies on a three-fold division into the external world, the mental world, and the social world as its highest levels of organization. Each of these is further divided for a total of 26 subcategories, and the subcategories further subdivided, and so on. Within the subcategories "items are organized by grammatical category and then in chronological order according to the citation dates in OED" (272). As Kay reports, HTOED's "theoretical position [is] that the classification at whatever level should develop from the data rather than be imposed upon it using some predetermined schema" (258). Her highly informative essay compares methods of organizing a thesaurus, commenting on thesauruses likely to be familiar to readers of this journal. Unlike a dictionary, in particular a large-scale one like the OED, which can be released in fascicles as each alphabetical section is completed, a thesaurus "as a whole cannot be considered complete and offered to the public until every last meaning is slotted into place," especially given that "words may be moved or categories added right up until the end" (264). In addressing crucial distinctions between a dictionary and a thesaurus, Kay includes discussion of conceptual and semantic fields and folk categories.

The other essays in this section illustrate in different ways the kind of information that can be derived from HTOED. Kate Wild's "Angelets, Trudgeons, and Bratlings: The Lexicalization of Childhood in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary" traces the fascinating development of notions of childhood over time. Marc Alexander's "'The various forms of civilization arranged in chronological strata': Manipulating the HTOED" relies on independent software to explore what can be learned about the development of vocabulary in broad terms throughout the history of English and what that can reveal about social and intellectual history. Disappointingly, the figures upon which his exposition relies depict subtle differences of black and white shading and have not uniformly reproduced well in print. Fortunately, the volume is available online at Polimetrica.com, and the online version displays somewhat clearer figures.

The other ten essays in the volume address chiefly English-language dictionaries. In the first essay, Dabney A. Bankert discusses Joseph Bosworth's "debt" to Henry J. Todd...