''The English Dialect Dictionary'' (''EDD'') is the most comprehensive

dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...

of English

dialect A dialect is a Variety (linguistics), variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standard language, standardized varieties as well as Vernacular language, vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardize ...

s ever published, compiled by the

Yorkshire Yorkshire ( ) is an area of Northern England which was History of Yorkshire, historically a county. Despite no longer being used for administration, Yorkshire retains a strong regional identity. The county was named after its county town, the ...

dialectologist Joseph Wright (1855–1930), with strong support by a team and his wife Elizabeth Mary Wright (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

Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...

and

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English pe ...

. Wright had hundreds of informants ("correspondents") and borrowed from thousands of written sources, mainly glossaries published by the English Dialect Society 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 ''EDDs nearly 80.000 entries (including the Supplement) were generally ignored during the 20th century but were made accessible by the interface of ''EDD Online'', the achievement of an Innsbruck University research project first published in 2012 and repeatedly revised since (version 4.0 in March 2023).

Joseph Wright

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. 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 Gothic and

. 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 English Dialect Society, finally to be elected to a full Professorship of Comparative Philology at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

. This was in 1900, when he was just publishing the different parts of his ''English Dialect Dictionary''. 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 ''English Dialect Dictionary'', were presented in a biography written after his death in 1930 by his widow Elizabeth Mary Wright.

Publishing history of the ''English Dialect Dictionary''

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 English Dialect Society, no publisher including

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...

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

Walter William Skeat Walter William Skeat, (21 November 18356 October 1912) was a British philologist and Anglican deacon. The pre-eminent British philologist of his time, he was instrumental in developing the English language as a higher education subject in th ...

, 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.

Arthur Balfour Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour (; 25 July 184819 March 1930) was a British statesman and Conservative Party (UK), Conservative politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1902 to 1905. As Foreign Secretary ...

, at the time First Lord of the Treasury, made a grant from the Royal Bounty Fund which helped to complete the work. 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 subscribers. While he found further sponsors, e.g.

Clarendon Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...

, which provided him rooms for a "workshop", he was compelled partially to finance the project himself. 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 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". 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.

Structure

The ''EDD'' 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 ''Dictionary'' 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 phraseologisms), as well as the areas of usage within the UK and worldwide. Moreover, the ''Dictionary'' is very scrupulous in adding information on historical precursors of dialect words, including both etymology and morphology. An impression of the form and size of the ''Dictionary'' is given by the following online versions of the six volumes:
Vol. 1: A-C

Vol. 2: D-G

Vol. 3: H-L

Vol. 4: M-Q

Vol. 5: R-S

Vol. 6: T-Z
with corrigenda, supplement, bibliography and grammar Due to the scale of the work and the period in which the information was gathered, the ''Dictionary'' 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

Bodleian Library The Bodleian Library () is the main research library of the University of Oxford. Founded in 1602 by Sir Thomas Bodley, it is one of the oldest libraries in Europe. With over 13 million printed items, it is the second-largest library in ...

at the University of Oxford.

''English Dialect Grammar''

The sixth volume includes the ''English Dialect Grammar'', 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. Unlike

Alexander John Ellis Alexander John Ellis (14 June 1814 – 28 October 1890) was an English mathematician, philologist and early phonetician who also influenced the field of musicology. He changed his name from his father's name, Sharpe, to his mother's maiden nam ...

's monumental work on ''Early English Pronunciation'', Volume V, Wright’s ''Grammar'' 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 ''Grammar'' 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 ''Introduction'' 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 Ellis a "disservice" by criticising Ellis's methods used in collecting data, but then using almost identical methods in ''English Dialect Grammar'' and taking on much of Ellis's data for his own work.Anderson, Peter M. 1977. "A New Light on Early English Pronunciation". Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society part 77, vol. 14.32-41. 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. Overall, the ''Grammar'', while obliged to many previous scholars, in the wake of the creation of the ''EDD'', introduced much new material G.L. Brook referred to the ''Grammar'' as "a less satisfactory work than the English Dialect Dictionary".

''EDD Online'' (Innsbruck Project)

The ''English Dialect Dictionary Online'' (''EDD Online''), a database and software initiated by Manfred Markus at the

University of Innsbruck The University of Innsbruck (; ) is a public research university in Innsbruck, the capital of the Austrian federal state of Tyrol (state), Tyrol, founded on October 15, 1669. It is the largest education facility in the Austrian States of Austria, ...

, provided a computerised version of Wright’s ''English Dialect Dictionary''. 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
EDD Online 4.0
While various scanned copies of the work from libraries are currently available through the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

, these disallow queries beyond the alphabetically arranged entry-headwords and beyond full-text searches, and Wright’s corrigenda and the 170-page ''Supplement'', 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 ''Dictionary''’s text beyond the mere headwords, in order to retrieve formally or semantically specific information based on the whole ''EDD''. Similar to the online version of the ''OED'' (''OED'' 3), ''EDD Online'' 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 ''EDD Online'' and the repercussions for a new concept of English dialectology are described in a monograph by Manfred Markus published in 2021.

References

External links

EDD at the Internet Archive

EDD project at Innsbruck University
{{DEFAULTSORT:English Dialect Dictionary, The 1898 non-fiction books British non-fiction literature Books about the English language English dictionaries Language histories Lexicology Arthur Balfour Dialects of English