152:
Henry Frowde, publisher to the
University of Oxford and no longer employee of Oxford University Press at the time, served as publisher. The six volumes appeared one at a time over eight years from 1898 to 1905, announced as "being the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to
80:
Compulsory school education was not introduced in Great
Britain until as late as 1870, so for Joseph Wright, born into a poor family in 1850, no school was available until he was 14 or 15. In his childhood, he had to work as a donkey-boy in a quarry and as a factory worker in a Bradford weaving mill.
144:
After years of nerve-racking hesitation and consultation, Wright finally decided for himself as editor to publish the dictionary by subscription at his own risk. This intention required an enormous amount of activity to promote the planned dictionary and gaining distinguished persons and scholars as
274:
Wright explicitly mentions that in the classification of the dialects he has "in a great measure followed the one given by Dr. Ellis". As regards phonetic details, Wright also borrowed material from Ellis, for which he has been criticized by some linguists. Peter
Anderson claimed that Wright did
59:
in the later 19th century, but also many literary texts written in dialect. In contrast to most of his sources, Wright pursued a scholarly linguistic method, providing full evidence of his sources and antedating modes of grammatical analysis of the 20th century. The contents of the
119:
During the years immediately preceding the appearance of the first part of the dictionary (1898), Joseph Wright was widely regarded with scepticism concerning both the academic value of the project and its financial coverage. While vast dialect material was made available by the
248:, which was also published separately. This includes 16,000 dialectal forms across two main sections: 'Phonology', which gives a historical description of the development of sounds in dialect; and 'Accidence', which gave details on grammar and especially on morphology.
279:
and taking on much of Ellis's data for his own work. Both Peter
Anderson and Graham Shorrocks have argued that Wright distorted Ellis's data by using a less precise phonetic notation and using vague geographical areas rather than the precise locations given by Ellis.
174:
lies in the wealth of information contained within the entries. The data provided refers to usage labels of the headwords, pronunciation, spelling and phonetic variants, definitions, quotations from thousands of sources, types of word formation (such as compounds and
169:
comprises almost 80.000 entries of dialect words, about 10.000 of which were added by the
Supplement. The entries are of different length, ranging from cross-references to analyses of dialectal forms and meanings expanding over several pages. The true value of the
47:(1863–1958). The time of dialect use covered is, by and large, the Late Modern English period (1700–1903), but given Wright's historical interest, many entries contain information on etymological precursors of dialect words in centuries as far back as
156:
The content was issued progressively as 28 parts intended for binding into the six volumes with publication dates of 1898, 1900, 1902, 1903, 1904 and 1905. Vol. 6 includes the list of both printed and unprinted sources arranged by counties.
128:
would take the pecuniary responsibility for a dictionary of the pre-conceived size. No well-established professor would be burdened by the foreseeably immense amount of drudgery work involved in such a project. However, Professor
81:
Yet he taught himself to read and write all by himself, started self-education on a large scale, attended night-schools, and soon had a good command of Latin, German and other languages and stages of languages, including
133:, founder and president of the English Dialect Society, had created a fund in 1886 (of which nearly half was his own money) for the initial collecting and arranging of the material for the dictionary.
266:
is very condensed. Its descriptive part comprises merely 82 pages, followed, however, by more than a hundred pages of an index, which relates words to dialect areas. The six chapters of the
230:
is a standard work in the historical study of dialect. Wright marked annotations and corrections in a cut-up and rebound copy of the first edition; this copy is among Wright's papers in the
341:, given their non-integrated position in the six-volume work, are bound to be overlooked. With the help of the Innsbruck interface, users can focus on different linguistic aspects of the
270:
proper are: I. Phonetic
Alphabet; II. The Vowels of Accented Syllables; III. The French Element; IV. Vowels of Unaccented Syllables; V. The Consonants; and VI. Accidence. In his
89:. After staying at German universities (Heidelberg, Leipzig) for over six years, he worked his way up in various teaching jobs, as a Deputy Professor and as secretary of the
153:
have been in use during the last two hundred years and founded on the publications of the
English Dialect Society and on a large amount of material never before printed".
104:
The details of Wright's boyhood and of the romance of his remarkable career ("from donkey-boy to professor"), as well as the difficulties he encountered in publishing the
735:
326:. The work on the project has been going on since 2006. The third version is presently (summer 2023) available. The fourth version was released in March 2023:
495:. London: Pan Macmillan. p. xviii: "...I wanted to celebrate one of the greatest - yet most neglected - lexicographic achievements of modern times.".
661:""Mr. A. J. Ellis – the pioneer of scientific phonetics in England" (Sweet 1877, vii): an examination of Ellis's data from the northeast of England"
361:
allows for a large number of parameters (e.g. compounds or variants) and filters (e.g. of areas and time). The details of the enormous potential of
337:, these disallow queries beyond the alphabetically arranged entry-headwords and beyond full-text searches, and Wright’s corrigenda and the 170-page
64:
s nearly 80.000 entries (including the
Supplement) were generally ignored during the 20th century but were made accessible by the interface of
640:
Anderson, Peter M. 1977. "A New Light on Early
English Pronunciation". Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society part 77, vol. 14.32-41.
55:. Wright had hundreds of informants ("correspondents") and borrowed from thousands of written sources, mainly glossaries published by the
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and the repercussions for a new concept of
English dialectology are described in a monograph by Manfred Markus published in 2021.
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is very scrupulous in adding information on historical precursors of dialect words, including both etymology and morphology.
345:’s text beyond the mere headwords, in order to retrieve formally or semantically specific information based on the whole
275:
Ellis a "disservice" by criticising Ellis's methods used in collecting data, but then using almost identical methods in
381:
Markus, Manfred. 2023 (forthcoming). "Phonetic Spellings in the Late Modern English Dialect of the Isle of Wight."
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Dialectologia et Geolinguistica. Journal of the International Society for Dialectology and Geolinguistics
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149:, which provided him rooms for a "workshop", he was compelled partially to finance the project himself.
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108:, were presented in a biography written after his death in 1930 by his widow Elizabeth Mary Wright.
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research project first published in 2012 and repeatedly revised since (version 4.0 in March 2023).
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A. J. ELLIS AS DIALECTOLOGIST: A REASSESSMENT, Historiographia Linguistica 18:2-3 (1991), page 324
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While various scanned copies of the work from libraries are currently available through the
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Due to the scale of the work and the period in which the information was gathered, the
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Markus, Manfred. 2021. "OED and EDD: Comparison of the Printed and Online Versions."
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93:, finally to be elected to a full Professorship of Comparative Philology at the
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179:), as well as the areas of usage within the UK and worldwide. Moreover, the
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97:. This was in 1900, when he was just publishing the different parts of his
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English Dialect Dictionary Online: A New Departure in English Dialectology
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The Disappearing Dictionary: A Treasury of Lost English Dialect Words
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as "a less satisfactory work than the English Dialect Dictionary".
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137:, at the time First Lord of the Treasury, made a grant from the
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is given by the following online versions of the six volumes:
291:, introduced much new material G.L. Brook referred to the
552:. London: Oxford University Press. p. Vol. 2, 364–5.
43:(1855–1930), with strong support by a team and his wife
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Markus, Manfred. 2021. "Joseph Wright's Sources in the
222:, with corrigenda, supplement, bibliography and grammar
467:"What are the characteristics of late Modern English?"
145:subscribers. While he found further sponsors, e.g.
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410:Markus, Manfred. 2019. "The Supplement to the
322:, provided a computerised version of Wright’s
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186:An impression of the form and size of the
627:. Oxford et al.: Henry Frowde. p. 1.
631:
516:. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
314:), a database and software initiated by
687:"The Future of English Dialect Studies"
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376:Dictionary of American Regional English
349:. Similar to the online version of the
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420:International Journal of Lexicography
414:: Its Structure and Value as Part of
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741:EDD project at Innsbruck University
141:which helped to complete the work.
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534:. London: Oxford University Press.
399:: Evidence of Spoken English from
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308:English Dialect Dictionary Online
766:Books about the English language
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35:ever published, compiled by the
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659:Maguire, Warren (August 2003).
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244:The sixth volume includes the
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234:at the University of Oxford.
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27:) is the most comprehensive
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625:The English Dialect Grammar
607:The English Dialect Grammar
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258:Early English Pronunciation
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412:English Dialect Dictionary
397:English Dialect Dictionary
324:English Dialect Dictionary
114:English Dialect Dictionary
112:Publishing history of the
106:English Dialect Dictionary
99:English Dialect Dictionary
666:. University of Edinburgh
550:The Life of Joseph Wright
532:The Life of Joseph Wright
124:, no publisher including
694:Leeds Studies in English
68:, the achievement of an
491:Crystal, David (2015).
441:"Elizabeth Mary Wright"
320:University of Innsbruck
277:English Dialect Grammar
246:English Dialect Grammar
239:English Dialect Grammar
126:Oxford University Press
122:English Dialect Society
91:English Dialect Society
57:English Dialect Society
756:1898 non-fiction books
582:Archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk
546:Wright, Elizabeth Mary
528:Wright, Elizabeth Mary
255:'s monumental work on
45:Elizabeth Mary Wright
771:English dictionaries
564:Vol. 1, pp. vii-viii
253:Alexander John Ellis
131:Walter William Skeat
95:University of Oxford
70:Innsbruck University
791:Dialects of English
685:Brook, G.L (1968).
302:(Innsbruck Project)
776:Language histories
576:Stevenson, Jane.
139:Royal Bounty Fund
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262:, Wright’s
220:Vol. 6: T-Z
215:Vol. 5: R-S
210:Vol. 4: M-Q
205:Vol. 3: H-L
200:Vol. 2: D-G
195:Vol. 1: A-C
49:Old English
31:of English
781:Lexicology
750:Categories
578:"Features"
450:27 October
427:References
416:EDD Online
407:29: 77-96.
401:EDD Online
363:EDD Online
359:EDD Online
343:Dictionary
339:Supplement
312:EDD Online
300:EDD Online
260:, Volume V
228:Dictionary
188:Dictionary
181:Dictionary
172:Dictionary
66:EDD Online
29:dictionary
161:Structure
37:Yorkshire
700:: 15–22.
623:(1905).
605:(1905).
587:29 March
548:(1932).
530:(1932).
512:(2021).
369:See also
33:dialects
670:4 March
318:at the
293:Grammar
285:Grammar
268:Grammar
264:Grammar
251:Unlike
717:9 June
476:9 June
83:Gothic
690:(PDF)
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719:2022
672:2017
589:2019
478:2022
452:2020
357:3),
306:The
165:The
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355:OED
351:OED
347:EDD
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Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Additional terms may apply.