Professor Lynda Mugglestone: List of publications

The Words in War-Time Project provides a detailed exploration of Andrew Clark's collection of notebooks and folders on the subject of "English Words in War-Time," assembled 1914-1919, and archived in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Clark's wide-ranging documentation - with annotations, definitions, frequency statements, and citational evidence of lexical/semantic change during World War I, along with frequent comparisons to the Oxford English Dictionary - has, as part of the project, been transferred to a tagged and fully searchable database, enabling, as this essay examines, new insights into Clark's interdisciplinary focus, his status as lexicographer, and the shifting patterns of language and lexical history in a period of critical change.

In the politics of war, languages have a dual impact: a public policy dimension, setting frameworks and expectations; and the lived...

While such images play their own role in lexicographical tradition, Johnson would, as this volume explores, also make them very much his own in a range of distinctive, and illuminating, ways.

Much (to say the least) has been written on the Victorian novel, and for good reason. ... threads emerge: we contrast romantic idealism with Victorian realism (the heroic 2 For example, Blackwell's Companion to the Victorian Novel....

With scholarship at once impeccable and approachable, the authors describe and explain the constantly changing sounds, words, meanings, and grammar of English. This is a book for everyone interested in the language, present and past.

With scholarship at once impeccable and approachable, the authors describe and explain the constantly changing sounds, words, meanings, and grammar of English. This is a book for everyone interested in the language, present and past.

© Oxford University Press 2012. All rights reserved. In 1819, William Hazlitt condemned Samuel Johnson's prose style as 'a species of rhyming' in which 'the close of the period follows as mechanically as the oscillation of a pendulum, the sense is balanced with the sound.' Predictable, formulaic, and unresponsive, Hazlitt's Johnson was a 'complete balance-master,' incapable of latitude and compromise, a mere automaton who rebounded from one position to its opposite extreme. Johnson, Hazlitt argued, 'never encourages hope, but he counteracts it by fear; he never elicits a truth, but he suggests some objection in answer to it.' This volume sets out to challenges Hazlitt's influential reading of the Johnsonian pendulum in a variety of ways. Rather than being trapped within a set of oppositions, Johnson emerges from these chapters as a writer who engages imaginatively and vigorously with flux, dynamism, and inconclusiveness. Johnson's life and writings embody the critical and creative play of ideas, a form of interaction with the world which is shaped by instability, contradiction, and combat. On the one hand, 'Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed;' on the other, 'To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.' Individual chapters present new perspectives on Johnson's work, life, and reception, addressing questions of style, authority, language, lexicography, and biography across a range of writings from the early poetry to the late prose.

© Cambridge University Press 2012. A book containing the words of any language in alphabetical order, with explanations of their meaning; a lexicon; a vocabulary; a word-book. An army, or a parliament, is a collection of men; a dictionary, or nomenclature, is a collection of words. Watts. By the eighteenth century the monolingual English dictionary, alphabetically organized and equipped with some form of definition for the words which it contained, was, as the lexicographer Benjamin Martin confirms, already a familiar work of reference: It is customary among all People to make an orderly Arrangement of all the Letters used in their Language, which we call by the Greek name Alphabet; as also of all the Words and Terms which compose the same: And such a Collection or Catalogue of Words is by Us called a Dictionary. As Johnson commented, this was in many ways to be an “age of dictionaries” (Letters, 1:79), characterized by both abundance and diversity. Small dictionaries “fit for the pocket” vied with larger multivolume works for a share of the public's attention. Dictionaries were written for school and home, for incidental reference or systematic self-improvement, and offered information on a variety of heads. When Johnson began composing his own dictionary in 1746, Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary already contained 42,000 word entries. A new edition of Bailey appeared in 1755, containing some 65,000 words and actively competing with Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, which had been published in April of that year. Earlier English dictionaries While Johnson is popularly described as the “father of the dictionary,” the reality was therefore rather different. The monolingual English dictionary can be traced to 1604, with the publication of Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, aimed at “unskilful readers” and containing roughly 2,500 “hard, usual words” such as bankerupt and rapacitie. Nevertheless, as Johnson argued in his Plan of a Dictionaryof the English Language (1747), “a very miscellaneous idea” had so far seemed to characterize English lexicography (Works, 18:30). The image of the dictionary as a remedy for educational deficits of particular kinds-able in particular to democratize the kind of polysyllabic and Latinate vocabulary which marked the classically educated “gentleman”-remained popular. The Glossographia Anglicana Nova: Interpreting Such Hard Words of Whatever Language, as Are at Present Used in the English Tongue (1707) therefore stressed its utility to those who could find themselves “not able to read a good Historian, or any Polite English Writer without an Interpreter.” Thomas Dyche and William Pardon likewise stressed the value of their own New General English Dictionary (1735) for the “Improvement of such as are Unacquainted with the Learned Languages.” “Hard words” had pride of place in most early English dictionaries, and familiar words and meanings were often neglected.

© Lynda Mugglestone 1995; 2003. All rights reserved. This book is a history of the rise and fall of the English accent as a badge of cultural, social, and class identity. The book traces the origins of the phenomenon in late 18th-century London, follows its history through the 19th and 20th centuries, and charts its downfall during the era of New Labour. The book provides a readable account of a fascinating subject, liberally spiced with quotations from English speech and writing over the past 250 years.

Language academies, and the dictionaries they produce, are often normative and regulatory, seeking to sanction preferred usages (traditionally those based in formal, literary contexts) and to proscribe others which, for various reasons, may be seen as less favored. Beginning in the Renaissance with the Italian Accademia della Crusca and extending to many nation-states (though not Great Britain), the role of the academy has often been explicitly interventionist, especially in terms of the legitimization of new words and meanings or, as with the current concerns of the Académie Française, in the attempt to restrain the influence of the Anglophone world in the lexis of science and technology. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.