To my surprise, the various old dictionaries don't appear to be available on-line. I could find no copy of Johnson's dictionary, indeed only one thing before the 1828 Websters. That one is a very hard-to use version Bailey's Dictionary (unclear which of the many editions). To browse or search you have to download a special reader; it is very slow; and it is only an image file, not a fully searchable text file. (The "save as text" feature is woefully inaccurate.)

That's a shame, because it is very impressively erudite, at least from the quick look I was able to give it. For example, here are parts of the entry for "A". (They took forever to forever to transcribe; that's how inaccessible this source is.)

... in all languages, ancient and modern, the character appropriated to the same sound is the first letter, except in the Abissine.

...three distinctly differing sounds. …The third is the broad sound like the German a, as in talk, balk. These words were formerly written witk au; thus talk was written taulk, and balk, baulk.

A [among the Romans] was used as an abbreviation of the word absolve, i.e. I acquit: it being usual for the judges to give their sentence upon persons, by casting tables into a box or urn, on which tables were the letters A, C, or N L. If they acquitted the person try'd, they cast into the urn a table with the letter A marked on it; if they condemned, with the letter C, for condemno, i.e. I condenm; if the matter was hard to be determined, with the letters N L, for non liquet, i.e. it does not appear plain. Hence Cicero calls the letter A litera salutaris, i.e. the salutary or saving letter. A was also used by the Romans, as the first of litteræ nundinales, in imitation of which, the dominical letters were introduced.

As CW found out when we visited her in Ohio, I love old dictionaries.

Shu, I tried to look at Bailey's with Adobe, and it said there was an error, and I couldn't view it. So I wasn't able to pull it up. I wanted to look at the "e's," for obvious reasons.

They are using a format called DjVu which appears to be similar (in function) to PDF (often known as Adobe Acrobat). A browser plugin can be downloaded from http://www.lizardtech.com/download/dl_options.php?page=doc The Windows version seems to be about 8 MB. I didn't bother to download it, so can't say any more, apart from that I'm not surprised Kalleh couldn't use Acrobat Reader to view the dictionary.

That's annoying. I've never even heard of .djvu, and am not interested in downloading YA proprietary reader just for that. I'm curious about his apparent statement that 'talk' had the sound [a] (or [A]) in the early 1700s. I want to know who Nathaniel Bailey was: Londoner, Northerner, Scot? It makes a difference. No useful biographical information on the web or in a proper book.

Aput, since I've already done the download, would you like me to send you sample pages as images you can read? If so, contact me by PM with your e-mail address.

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Edit: While searching for a Bailey bio, I stumbled across an extremely blue poem from the reign of Charles II. (The anthologist giving that poem cited Bailey for a definition of 'tarse'.) A more conveniently-accessed copy of that poem appears here.

Bailey, unlike Johnson, included in his dictionary such words as the c-word, the f-word, and 'tarse'. Bailey's dictionary went through at least 50 years of printings, many them after his death, and I gather that such words were removed from later editions.

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You're right. I surely couldn't find much about Bailey on the Web; I even checked Google Scholar. There must be some information on him somewhere.

"My Lord Rochester fled from Court some time since for delivering (by mistake) into the King's hands a terrible lampoon of his own making against the King, instead of another the King asked him for."

Oh wow! Way to shoot yourself in the foot!

Arnie, I was thinking he was lucky not to have been shot by someone else after that!

Bailey is now underway in Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreading. It's a 1772 edition, expanded from the original, and they're up to C.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
As CW found out when we visited her in Ohio, I love old dictionaries.

You might like A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary by John R. Clark Hall, Second Edition.

It looks as though someone has scanned all the pages and saved them as tiff or png format. Like most of these graphics, they enlarge when you click on them. This is slightly too much for me because my screen resolution is 800 x 600 (it's easier on my eyes) but it should work much better at higher resolutions.

There's also Dictionary of Americanisms, by John Russell Bartlett (1848). It's not quite as old as Johnson's Dictionary, but it's interesting in its own right. This is the first entry for "A":

"ABISSELFA. A, by itself, A. It will be recollected by many, that in the olden time, the first letter of the alphabet was denominated "abisselfa" when it formed a syllable by itself, in in the word able. The scholar, in spelling the word, was taught to say, "a, by itself, a, (rapidly, abisselfa,) b, l, e, able." We derive this word and the use of it from England, where it is used in Suffolk County.--Moor's Glossary."

I also like this:

"TO RETROSPECT. To look back; to affect what is passed.--Webster.

Mr. Pickering has the following illustration:

To give a correct idea of the circumstances which have gradually produced this conviction, it may be useful to retrospect to an early period.--Letter from Alex. Hamilton to John Adams.

This word cannot be said to be much used. The writings of Gen. Hamilton abound in peculiar expressions."

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