A glance at any map will suggest hundreds upon hundreds of constructions and imports that we now know to be more a part of today's English than they ever were of the native tongues where they were first born. Glasnost and perestroika, for example, are firmly ensconced in the English vocabulary now, despite their being utterly unfamiliar outside their native Russia before 1989. Anorak, from Greenland, is a word which, when introduced, described a foul-weather garment; it has since become used (though only in Britain) as a term of disapprobation, describing someone seen as rather too interested in a subject most reasonable people would think of as wholly boring. Sauna, dachshund, ombudsman, waltz, cobra, bwana, ouzo, agitprop, samovar, kraal, boondock, boomerang, colleen, manga, kava, tattoo, poncho, pecan, puma, piranha—the list of foreign borrowings introduced over the past two centuries is near-endless. The 200,000 words that could be counted in the lexicon at the close of the Renaissance have in the centuries since tripled, at the very least, and the rate of expansion of the planet's most versatile and flexible vocabulary seems in no danger of slowing.
2. The Measuring
And yet, and yet. Until the very beginning of the seventeenth century, a time when the English language could quite probably number fully a quarter of a million words and phrases and those individual items of vocabulary that are known as lexemes among its riches, there was not a single book in existence that attempted to list even a small fraction of them, nor was there any book that would make the slightest attempt to offer up an inventory.
No one, it turned out, had ever bothered. No one had ever thought of making a list of all the words and noting down what they seemed to mean—even though from today's perspective, from a world that seems obsessed with a need to count and codify and define and make categories for everything, there seems no rational reason why this might have been so. That no one cared enough about the lexicon to make a list of what it held seems barely credible. It was as though the language that had been developing over the centuries had created itself invisibly, had somehow crept silently over the minds and manners of all those who spoke and read and listened to it, and never in such a demonstrative or showy way as to make any speaker or listener or reader aware that it actually was an entity, that it was something that could and should be measured, enumerated, catalogued, described. English seemed to most of its users to be somehow like the air—something that had always been there, to be as taken for granted as the very atmosphere itself, inchoate and indefinable, and thus somehow not amenable to proper measurement or systematic knowledge. It was a thing simply to be felt, breathed, and uttered—and never something so base as ever to be studied, annotated, or counted.
To those of us who reach for a dictionary or a thesaurus at the first moment of literary puzzlement, the lack of any such book must have been an inconvenience, to say the least. And yet it was an inconvenience suffered in silence by the best of them, and for a very long time. William Shakespeare, for example, had no access to a dictionary during most of his writing career—certainly from 1580, when he first began, it was a quarter of a century before any volume might appear in which he could look something up. We have already seen how frequently and flamboyantly Shakespeare contributed words to the language (dislocate, dwindle, and submerged are three more to add to those above); but to do so he had, essentially, either to find such words in other writings, note down words or expressions that he heard in conversation, or else invent or conjure words out of the thin air.
That is not to say there were no reference books available at all. In the late sixteenth century bookstore tables were weighed down with all manner of missals, biographies, histories of the sciences and of art, prayer books, Bibles, romances, atlases, and accounts of exotic travel. Shakespeare would have had access to all these, and more. He is known (from a careful statistical examination of his word usages) to have used as a crib a Thesaurus edited by the Bishop of Winchester, one Thomas Cooper, 6 and probably also a volume called The Arte of Rhetorique by Thomas Wilson. But that is alclass="underline" neither Shakespeare, nor any of the other great writing minds of the day—Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Ben Jonson—had access to what all of us today would be certain that he would have wanted: the lexical convenience that went by the name that was invented in 1538, a dictionary.
The 1538 creation was not, however, for the purposes of most English writers, of any real convenience at all. It was a book that had been edited by Sir Thomas Elyot—already famed as an enthusiast for all words foreign—and it was, like all such volumes before, a translating dictionary, in this particular case offering words in Latin, with their English equivalents, and vice versa. It offered no sense of the meaning of the words—just their equivalence in another tongue. No one had by then come up with the idea of what we now know a dictionary to be: a list of English words in (most probably) an alphabetical order, with the meanings and perhaps the various senses of each listed, and perhaps some guidance as to the spelling, pronunciation, and origin of each word as well.
A man named John Withals took a hesitating few steps towards the ideal, producing twenty years after Elyot a Latin±English vocabulary book in which the words were organized into categories. He collected together words that had something to do with skie, for example, or four-footed beastes, partes of housinge, instruments of musicke, and the names of Byrdes, Byrdes of the Water, Byrdes about the house as cockes, hennes etc; of Bees, Flies and Others. The usefulness of such a book is now self-evident: rather than merely offering a means of translating one word into another language, Withals's small volume classified them, and by doing so reminded readers of, let us say, the names of birds, nudging them towards improving their knowledge. Can't remember the name of a bird between shrike and tern? In Withals there is swallow and swift—and at a stroke his book becomes, if little else, an aide-meÂmoire. He called it A Shorte Dictionary for Yonge Beginners: it became a standard school textbook and was wildly popular, remaining in print for more than 70 years, at least until 1634.
The longevity of Mr Withals's book hints at the growing popularity of this entirely new trend in seventeenth-century publishing. There was evidently a pressing need for a change towards volumes that had utility in English alone, and not merely as vehicles for the use of another language. It was a need that was occasionally voiced publicly, as on stage in The Duchess of Malfi, when John Webster had the Duchess's brother Ferdinand exclaim, after puzzling over the word lycanthropia, 7 `I need a dictionary to't!' On a more scholarly level the drumbeat of need was signalled too: as when the newly appointed headmaster of the Merchant Taylors' School, Richard Mulcaster, declared: `it would be a thing verie praiseworthy … if som one learned and as laborious a man, wold gather all the wordes which we vse in our English tung … into one dictionarie.' Mulcaster promised that he would gather up and deliver one, but never did; nor did his fellow grammarian William Bullokar. Nor did anyone else.
Until finally, in 1604, som one learned did go out gathering, and eventually produced what the entire literary universe was apparently baying for. This historically important (but otherwise generally unremembered) figure was a schoolmaster from Oakham in Rutland called Robert Cawdrey, and he offered—by courtesy of his publisher, `Edward Weaver, of the great north door of St. Paul's'—a slender octavo book of 120 printed pages entitled A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usuall English words, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latin or French, &c. The book had gathered up 3,000 of these `hard words', and had been particularly edited, Cawdrey stated on his title page with all the magnificent carelessness of the times, `for the benefit and helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskillful person'.