''Walker's Rhyming Dictionary'' was made by John Walker and released in 1775. It is an English

reverse dictionary A reverse dictionary is a dictionary alphabetized by the reversal of each entry: :stock (kcots) :diestock (kcotseid) :restock (kcotser) :livestock (kcotsevil) Before computers, reverse dictionaries were tedious to produce. The first computer-pro ...

, meaning that it is sorted by reading words in reverse order. As spelling somewhat predicts pronunciation, this functions as a rhyming dictionary. Laurence H. Dawson, in his Preface to the ‘Revised and Enlarged edition’ of Walker’s dictionary in the first half of the twentieth century, notes that: "Though it was never in the true sense a dictionary of rhymes, has been for over one hundred and fifty years a standard work of reference and has been a friend in need for generations of poets and rhymesters from

Byron George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824) was an English poet. He is one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest poets of the United Kingdom. Among his best-kno ...

downwards." Indeed, John Walker apologised for the book’s title, stating that the main purpose of his dictionary was to "facilitate the

orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...

and pronunciation of the English language". Dawson rejects the possibility of it being used for this purpose, claiming that it will instead be useful to "contributors to the 'Poets' Corner' or writer of humorous verse", "the

phonetician Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

", "the enthusiast for some new system of Simplified Spelling", and solvers of "

Acrostics An acrostic is a poem or other word composition in which the ''first'' letter (or syllable, or word) of each new line (or paragraph, or other recurring feature in the text) spells out a word, message or the alphabet. The term comes from the Fre ...

". Walker's original 1775 edition of the dictionary contained 34000 words, and Dawson's expanded twentieth-century edition added approximately 20000 more words to the volume. Michael Freeman's 1983 supplement enlarged the dictionary further, choosing to include slang and an increased numbers of words without Anglophone origins, for example, in the first 10 entries in his supplement include

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

, Brazilian,

Egyptian ''Egyptian'' describes something of, from, or related to Egypt. Egyptian or Egyptians may refer to: Nations and ethnic groups * Egyptians, a national group in North Africa ** Egyptian culture, a complex and stable culture with thousands of year ...

Tatar Tatar may refer to: Peoples * Tatars, an umbrella term for different Turkic ethnic groups bearing the name "Tatar" * Volga Tatars, a people from the Volga-Ural region of western Russia * Crimean Tatars, a people from the Crimea peninsula by the B ...

and

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth's land area and 6% of its total surfac ...

n words (p. 551). Proper nouns are not, by and large, covered by the dictionary, although some exceptions are made "for a number the pronunciation of which are not self-evident". It also has some Scots words, including callant, hogmanay, wrongous, een, tolbooth, and wis/wist (although it is not a regular word)..

References

{{Reflist English dictionaries Rhyme