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|New Entries in Lexicons of Early Modern English|
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 22.0302 Wednesday, 16 November 2011
Date: November 15, 2011 12:26:13 PM EST
Subject: New Entries in Lexicons of Early Modern English
[Editor’s Note: I have been a user of LEME when it was EMDD and have subscribed to it ever since it became LEME. I find it an invaluable tool for annotating. HMC]
Locating historical references and accessing manuscripts can be difficult with countless hours spent searching for a single text for the sparsest of contributions to your research.
Lexicons of Early Modern English is a growing historical database offering scholars unprecedented access to early books and manuscripts documenting the growth and development of the English language. With more than 580,000 word-entries from 176 monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopedias, hard-word glossaries, spelling lists, and lexically-valuable treatises surviving in print or manuscript from the Tudor, Stuart, Caroline, Commonwealth, and Restoration periods, LEME sets the standard for modern linguistic research on the English language.
Use Modern Techniques to Research Early Modern English!
§ 176 Searchable lexicons
§ 122 Fully analyzed lexicons
§ 588,721 Total word entries
§ 368,372 Fully analyzed word entries
§ 60,891 Total English modern headwords
Lexicons recently added to LEME
§ Anonymous, Catholicon Anglicum: The Remedy for all Diseases (ca. 1475), an English-Latin dictionary from Lord Monson's manuscript, reconstructed from a 19th-century Early English Text Society edition. The earliest such lexicon surviving in the language holding some 7,180 word-entries, distinguishes itself by the extensive use of Latin synonyms in explanations.
§ John Lydgate, The Horse the Ghoos and the Sheep (1477)
§ William Caxton, French and English (ca. 1480)
§ Anonymous, The Fromond List of Garden Plants (ca. 1525),a list of about 138 plants associated with Thomas Fourmond / Formond of Carssalton, Surrey (died March 21, 1542/43). The list has nine sections: for a garden, for pottage, for sauce, for the cop, for salad, to still, for savour and beauty, roots, and for an herber.
§ Niels Hemmingsen, A Postle, or Exposition of the Gospels (1569), a translation of Niel Hemmingsen's Postilla seu enarratio Evangeliorum (Copenhagen, 1561)
§ John Florio, Florio his First Fruits (1578), parallel Italian-English dialogues, followed by a brief Italian-English glossary and a grammar
§ Anonymous, The Academy of Pleasure (1656)
§ William Lucas, A Catalogue of Seeds, Plants, &c. (ca. 1677) a trade-list in eleven sections: seeds of roots, sallad seeds, potherb seeds, sweet herb seeds, physicall seeds, flower seeds, seeds of evergreen & flowering trees, sorts of pease, beans, &c., seeds to improve land, flower roots, and sorts of choice trees & plants
§ Peter Levins, Manipulus Vocabulorum (London, 1570), a dictionary of 8,940 English-Latin word-entries, organized by English rhyme-endings (with accentuation). This analyzed text owes much to Huloet (added in 2009) and replaces the simple transcription now in the LEME database.
Coming soon to LEME
Henry Hexham's Copious English and Netherduytch Dictionarie (English-Dutch; 1647-48).
John Rider's Bibliotheca Scholastica, an English-Latin dictionary first published by the University of Oxford in 1589.
There are two versions of LEME, a public one and a licensed one. The public version of LEME allows anyone, anywhere, to do simple searches on the multilingual lexical database. The licensed version of LEME is designed as a full-featured scholarly resource for original research into the entire lexical content of Early Modern English.
LEME is designed as a full-featured scholarly resource that allows you to search the entire lexical content of Early Modern English. It provides exciting research opportunities for linguistic historians through the following powerful features:
§ Searchable word-entries (simple, wildcard, Boolean, and proximity)
§ Documentary period database of more than 10,000 works from the Early Modern era
§ Large primary bibliography of more than 1,000 early works known to include lexical information
§ Browseable page-by-page transcriptions of lexical works
§ A selection list of editorially lemmatized headwords unique to each lexical text
§ Continually updated new dictionaries, glossaries, and tools each year
For more information, please contact
University of Toronto Press
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tel: (416) 667-7810
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