Histories of Dictionaries: Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Research Dictionaries as a Growth Area of Study

In the last two decades, a number of significant studies of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century dictionaries of the English language have been published. The purpose of this article is to explore the origin of and development of interest in this area of the history of lexicography, especially as exemplified by studies of the Oxford English Dictionary, the English Dialect Dictionary, and Webster’s Third, and to consider the various ways in which the stories of particular dictionaries have been told. What do differing treatments, both popular and scholarly, tell us about this growing area of study, and what common features can be discerned?