Fixing Babel: An Historical Anthology of Applied English Lexicography

We all think we know what a dictionary is for and how to use one, and go right to the words we wish to look up. Yet dictionary users have not always known how English 'works' and this book reproduces and examines important texts in which early dictionary authors explain choices and promote ideas. Fixing Babel provides authoritative transcriptions of documents from the front matter of major English dictionaries over a two-hundred-year period. It also provides commentary on, and annotation of, a wide range of lexicographical concerns.