Customer Reviews

The First English Dictionary, 1604: Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall

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Using words from the dictionary itself, I composed this thank-you:

I would be reachless if I were not to raunge a morigerous brachygraphie to thank the one who impetrated this oblectation of a book. I cannot now oppugne such clavicordes it has brought to this half-pistated swaine of a smatterer. I dehort anyone's periclitating to combure this book; that would be menstrous misprission.

Bodleian Library has done a great service for those who love words and dictionaries by reprinting the first English dictionary of 1604.

Fascinating for those interested in words. The dictionary is put into modern typeface for accessibility and a biography of Cawdrey is added.

This ed. would be improved by the addition of a few pages of definitions in facsimile; the original typefaces and how they are used are interesting in themselves even if not easy for modern readers.

Contrary to the jacket notes, this is not the first new ed. in 350 years. There was a facsimile ed. in 1970 A table alphabeticall (The English experience, its record in early printed books published in facsimile), no. 226). I suppose that a purist could argue that a facsimile ed. is not a new ed.

This book has an outstanding introduction in which John Simpson explains the background to its compiling and its significance. In the course of this he presents an outline of the life of Robert Cawdry who was truly an adventurous innovative and courageous soul. Defrocked for his dissenting opinions he went his own way in writing and compiling books, while supporting a very large family. He was aided in his work by his son Thomas. He hoped to provide help to the general public to those ordinary folk i.e. non-scholars, who did not know the meaning of many terms recently introduced into the language. This was in a time of spectacular development of the language, Elizabethan England. The book was of great help to subsequent makers of English-English dictionaries and so is an important milestone historically. Many of the terms and their definitions are identical with those we know today although with slightly different spellings. But there are some quite unrecognizable to us today. This makes the reading of the text a kind of game in which one may pick out delights here and there, and sense how spellings and meanings of words have altered in time.
A few examples:

alarum: a sound to the battel
elegancie :finesse of speech
iudaisme : worshipping one God without Christ
poet(gr) a verse-maker
profound: deepe or high
rheume , gr. A distilling of humours from the head
sanitie : health or soundness
singularitie: being like no boy else, in opinion, or other wayes
thwite: shaue
traffique(fr) bargayning

Your basic dictionary--words and one-line "definitions," but also words we no longer use or think of differently. Too new for me to know how useful it might turn out to be.