Description
“A delight”—Booklist
A richly illustrated historical account of English-language dictionaries, and the people who made them, from the dawn of printing to the present day.
Dictionaries are repositories of erudition, monuments to linguistic authority, and battlefields in cultural and political struggles. For centuries, they were also works of almost superhuman endurance, produced by people who devoted themselves for years, even decades, to the wearisome labor of corralling, recording, and defining the vocabulary of a language. Dictionaries also are often beautiful objects: typographically innovative, designed to project learning and authority.
Painstakingly collected and lovingly presented, here are the stories behind great works of scholarship and the people who produced them—their prodigious endurance, their nationalist fervor, their philological elucubrations haphazardly mixed with crackpot theories, their
