or mourning garment; and Aristotle doubts whether [word in Greek]
in the Iliad, signifies a mule, or muleteer, I may surely, without
shame, leave some obscurities to happier industry, or future
information.

The rigour of interpretative lexicography requires that the
explanation, and the word explained, should always be reciprocal;
this I have always endeavoured, but could not always attain. Words
are seldom exactly synonimous; a new term was not introduced,
but because the former was thought inadequate: names, therefore,
have often many ideas, but few ideas have many names. It was then
necessary to use the proximate word, for the deficiency of single
terms can very seldom be supplied by circumlocution; nor is the
inconvenience great of such mutilated interpretations, because the
sense may easily be collected entire from the examples.

In every word of extensive use, it was requisite to mark the progress
of its meaning, and show by what gradations of intermediate sense
it has passed from its primitive to its remote and accidental
signification; so that every foregoing explanation should tend to
that which follows, and the series be regularly concatenated from
the first notion to the last.

This is specious, but not always practicable; kindred senses may
be so interwoven, that the perplexity cannot be disentangled, nor
any reason be assigned why one should be ranged before the other.
When the radical idea branches out into parallel ramifications,
how can a consecutive series be formed of senses in their nature
collateral? The shades of meaning sometimes pass imperceptibly into
each other; so that though on one side they apparently differ, yet