Fixing Babel: An Historical Anthology of Applied English Lexicography

We all think we know what a dictionary is for and how to use one, so most of us skip the first pages—the front matter—and go right to the words we wish to look up. Yet dictionary users have not always known how English “works” and my book reproduces and examines for the first time important texts in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dictionary authors explain choices and promote ideas to readers, their “end users.” Unlike French, Spanish, and Italian dictionaries compiled during thi...