Nathan Bailey

Last updated

Nathan Bailey (died 27 June 1742), was an English philologist and lexicographer. [1] [2] He was the author of several dictionaries, including his Universal Etymological Dictionary , which appeared in some 30 editions between 1721 and 1802. Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum (1730 and 1736) was the primary resource mined by Samuel Johnson for his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). [3] [4] [5]

Contents

Life

Bailey was a Seventh Day Baptist, admitted 1691 to a congregation in Whitechapel, London. He was probably excluded from the congregation by 1718. Later he had a school at Stepney. William Thomas Whitley attributes to him a degree of LL.D. [6]

Works

Bailey, with John Kersey the younger, was a pioneer of English lexicography, and changed the scope of dictionaries of the language. Greater comprehensivity became the common ambition. Up to the early eighteenth century, English dictionaries had generally focused on "hard words" and their explanation, for example those of Thomas Blount and Edward Phillips in the generation before. With a change of attention, to include more commonplace words and those not of direct interest to scholars, the number of headwords in English dictionaries increased spectacularly. [7] Innovations were in the areas of common words, dialect, technical terms, and vulgarities. [6] Thomas Chatterton, the literary forger, also obtained many sham-antique words from reading Bailey and Kersey. [8]

Bailey's An Universal Etymological English Dictionary , from its publication in 1721, became the most popular English dictionary of the 18th century, and went through nearly thirty editions. [8] It was a successor to Kersey's A New English Dictionary (1702), and drew on it. A supplementary volume of his dictionary appeared in 1727, and in 1730 a folio edition, the Dictionarium Britannicum [9] containing many technical terms. [8] Bailey had collaborators, for example John Martyn who worked on botanical terms in 1725. [10]

Samuel Johnson made an interleaved copy the foundation of his own Johnson's Dictionary . [8] The 1755 edition of Bailey's dictionary bore the name of Joseph Nicol Scott also; it was published years after Bailey's death, but months only after Johnson's dictionary appeared. Now often known as the "Scott-Bailey" or "Bailey-Scott" dictionary, it contained relatively slight revisions by Scott, but massive plagiarism from Johnson's work. A twentieth-century lexicographer, Philip Babcock Gove, attacked it retrospectively on those grounds. [11] In all, thirty editions of the dictionary appeared, the last at Glasgow in 1802, in reprints and versions by different booksellers. [8]

Bailey's dictionary was also the basis of English-German dictionaries. These included those edited by Theodor Arnold (3rd edition, 1761), Anton Ernst Klausing (8th edition, 1792), and Johann Anton Fahrenkrüger (11th edition, 1810). [8]

Bailey also published a spelling-book in 1726; All the Familiar Colloquies of Erasmus Translated (1733), of which a new edition appeared in 1878; [12] 'The Antiquities of London and Westminster,' 1726; 'Dictionarium Domesticum,' 1736 (which was also a cookbook on recipes, including fried chicken [13] ); Selections from Ovid and Phædrus; and 'English and Latin Exercises.' In 1883 appeared 'English Dialect Words of the Eighteenth Century as shown in the . . . Dictionary of N. Bailey', with an introduction by W. E. A. Axon (English Dialect Society), giving biographical and bibliographical details. [8]

List of selected works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dictionary</span> Collection of words and their meanings

A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically, which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data.

<i>A Dictionary of the English Language</i> 1755 dictionary by Samuel Johnson

A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, was published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson. It is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language.

Honorificabilitudinitatibus is the dative and ablative plural of the medieval Latin word honōrificābilitūdinitās, which can be translated as "the state of being able to achieve honours". It is mentioned by the character Costard in Act V, Scene I of William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Murray (lexicographer)</span> Primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (1837–1915)

Sir James Augustus Henry Murray, FBA was a British lexicographer and philologist. He was the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from 1879 until his death.

John Ash was an English Baptist minister at Pershore, Worcestershire, and author of an English dictionary and grammar books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Worlidge</span> English agriculturalist

John Worlidge or John Woolridge (1640–1700) was a noted English agriculturalist, who lived in Petersfield, Hampshire, England. He was considered a great expert on rural affairs, and one of the first British agriculturalists to discuss the importance of farming as an industry.

The English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) is the most comprehensive dictionary of English dialects ever published, compiled by the Yorkshire dialectologist Joseph Wright (1855–1930), with strong support by a team and his wife Elizabeth Mary Wright (1863–1958). The time of dialect use covered is, by and large, the Late Modern English period (1700–1903), but given Wright's historical interest, many entries contain information on etymological precursors of dialect words in centuries as far back as Old English and Middle English. Wright had hundreds of informants ("correspondents") and borrowed from thousands of written sources, mainly glossaries published by the English Dialect Society in the later 19th century, but also many literary texts written in dialect. In contrast to most of his sources, Wright pursued a scholarly linguistic method, providing full evidence of his sources and antedating modes of grammatical analysis of the 20th century. The contents of the EDD's nearly 80.000 entries were generally ignored during the 20th century but were made accessible by the interface of EDD Online, the achievement of an Innsbruck University research project first published in 2012 and repeatedly revised since.

John Ryder (1562–1632) was a lexicographer who published an English-Latin Dictionary that was widely used in the 17th century. A favourite of Elizabeth I, he was Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, and the Anglican Bishop of Killaloe.

Stephen Skinner (1623–1667) was an English Lincoln physician, lexicographer and etymologist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elisha Coles</span>

Elisha Coles was a 17th-century English lexicographer and stenographer.

The New World of English Words, or, a General Dictionary is an English dictionary compiled by Edward Phillips and first published in London in 1658. It was the first folio English dictionary. 

A New English Dictionary: or, a complete collection of the most proper and significant words, commonly used in the language was an English dictionary compiled by philologist John Kersey and first published in London in 1702.

The Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum is a dictionary compiled by philologist John Kersey, which was first published in London in 1708.

John Kersey the younger was an English philologist and lexicographer of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He is notable for editing three dictionaries in his lifetime: A New English Dictionary (1702), a revised version of Edward Phillips' The New World of English Words (1706) and the Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708).

An Universal Etymological English Dictionary was a dictionary compiled by Nathan Bailey and first published in London in 1721. It was the most popular English dictionary of the eighteenth century until the publication of Samuel Johnson's massive dictionary in 1755. As an indicator of its popularity, the dictionary reached its 20th edition in 1763 and its 27th edition in 1794. Its last edition (30th) was in 1802. It was a little over 900 pages long. In compiling his dictionary, Bailey borrowed greatly from John Kersey's Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1706), which in turn drew from the later editions of Edward Phillips's The New World of English Words. Like Kersey's dictionary, Bailey's dictionary was one of the first monolingual English dictionaries to focus on defining words in common usage, rather than just difficult words.

Cock ale, popular in 17th and 18th-century England, was an ale whose recipe consisted of normal ale, to which was later added a bag stuffed with a parboiled, skinned and gutted cock, and various fruits and spices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benjamin Martin (lexicographer)</span>

Benjamin Martin was a lexicographer who compiled one of the early English dictionaries, the Lingua Britannica Reformata (1749). He also was a lecturer on science and maker of scientific instruments.

Papias was a Latin lexicographer from Italy. Although he is often referred to as Papias the Lombard, little is known of his life, including whether he actually came from Lombardy. The Oxford History of English Lexicography considers him the first modern lexicographer for his monolingual dictionary (Latin-Latin), Elementarium Doctrinae Rudimentum, written over a period of ten years in the 1040s. The Elementarium has been called "the first fully recognizable dictionary" and is a landmark in the development of dictionaries as distinct from mere collections of glosses. Papias arranges entries alphabetically based on the first three letters of the word, and is the first lexicographer to name the authors or texts he uses as sources. Although most entries are not etymological, Papias laid the groundwork for derivational lexicography, which became firmly established only a century later.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Lediard</span> English writer and surveyor

Thomas Lediard (1685–1743) was an English writer and surveyor.

A historical dictionary or dictionary on historical principles is a dictionary which deals not only with the latterday meanings of words but also the historical development of their forms and meanings. It may also describe the vocabulary of an earlier stage of a language's development without covering present-day usage at all. A historical dictionary is primarily of interest to scholars of language, but may also be used as a general dictionary.

References

  1. Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Bailey, Nathan"  . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
  2. Stephen, Leslie; Lee, Sidney (1908). "Nathan Bailey". The Dictionary of National Biography (2 ed.). London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  3. Starnes, De Witt T.; Noyes, Gertrude (1946). The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson 1604-1755 . Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press. pp.  98–125.
  4. Green, Jonathan (1996). Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made. New York: Henry Holt & Co. pp. 226–286.
  5. Drabble, Margaret (2000). The Oxford Companion to English Literature (6 ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.  59.
  6. 1 2 Hancher, Michael. "Bailey, Nathaniel". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/1055.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  7. Green, p. 226.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Bailey, Nathan"  . Dictionary of National Biography . London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
  9. 'Dictionarium Britannicum, collected by several hands. The Mathematical part by G. Gordon, the Botanical by P. Miller. The whole revis'd and improv'd with many thousand additions by N. Bailey.'
  10. Dictionary of National Biography , Martyn, John (1699–1768), botanist, by G. S. Boulger. Published 1893.
  11. Green, p. 235.
  12. Desiderius Erasmus, The Colloquies of Erasmus , trans. by Nathan Bailey, ed. by E. Johnson, 2 vols (London: Reeves and Turner, 1878).
  13. Pereira, Alyssa (22 June 2016). "The internet is obsessing over this 18th century fried chicken recipe". San Francisco Chronicle . Retrieved 23 June 2016.

Bibliography

Attribution

Commons-logo.svg Media related to Nathan Bailey at Wikimedia Commons


Wikisource-logo.svg Works by or about Nathan Bailey at Wikisource