The evolution of English lexicography by James Augustus Henry Murray
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page 25 of 42 (59%)
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Words,' furnished with an engraved frontispiece, containing views of
Oxford and Cambridge, and portraits of some Oxford and Cambridge scholars, lived on in successive editions as long as Blount's. Time and space forbid me even to recount the later dictionaries of this class and period; we need only mention that of Elisha Coles, a chorister and subsequently matriculated student of Magdalen College (of which his uncle, Elisha Coles, was steward under the Commonwealth), a meritorious work which passed through numerous editions down to 1732; and that of Edward Cocker, the celebrated arithmetician and writing-master of St. George's, Southwark, by whom people still sometimes asseverate 'according to Cocker.' This was published after his death, 'from the author's correct copy,' by John Hawkins, in 1704, with a portrait of the redoubtable Cocker himself in flowing wig and gown, and the following lines:-- 'COCKER, who in fair writing did excell, And in Arithmetic perform'd as well, This necessary work took next in hand, That Englishmen might English understand.' The last edition of Phillips' _New World of Words_ was edited after his death, with numerous additions, by John Kersey, son of John Kersey the mathematician. Two years later Kersey threw the materials into another form and published it in an octavo, as Kersey's '_Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum_, or a General English Dictionary,' of which three editions appeared before 1721. In this work there are included a considerable number of obsolete words, chiefly from Spenser and his contemporaries, marked O., and in some cases erroneously explained. Professor Skeat has pointed out that this was the source of |
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