that a Dictionary should also show the pronunciation of the living word; the extension of the function of quotations by Richardson; the idea that the Dictionary should be a biography of every word, and should set forth every fact connected with its origin, history, and use, on a strictly historical method.  These stages coincide necessarily with stages of our national and literary history; the first two were already reached before the Norman Conquest; the third followed upon the recognition of English as the official language of the nation, and its employment by illustrious Middle English writers.  The Dictionaries of the modern languages were necessitated first by the fact that French had at length ceased to be the living tongue of any class of Englishmen, and secondly by the other fact that the rise of the modern languages and increasing intercourse with the Continent made Latin no longer sufficient as a common medium of international communication.  The consequences of the Renascence and of the New Learning of the sixteenth century appear in the need for the Dictionaries of Hard Words at the beginning of the seventeenth; the literary polish of the age of Anne begat the yearning for a standard dictionary, and inspired the work of Johnson; the scientific and historical spirit of the nineteenth century has at once called for and rendered possible the Oxford English Dictionary.  Thus the evolution of English Lexicography has followed with no faltering steps the evolution of English History and the development of English Literature.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Thus the first six Latin words in A glossed are apodixen, amineae, amites, arcontus, axungia; the last six are arbusta, anser, affricus, atticus, auiaria, avena; mostly ‘hard’ Latin it will be perceived.  The Erfurt Glossary is, to a great extent, a duplicate of the Epinal.

[2] Thus the first five Latin entries in ab- are abminiculum, abelena, abiecit, absida, abies, and the last five aboleri, ab borea, abiles, aborsus, absorduum.  To find whether a wanted word in ab- occurs in this glossary, it was necessary to look through more than two columns containing ninety-five entries.

[3] An important collection of these early beginnings of lexicography in England was made so long ago as 1857, by the late distinguished antiquary Thomas Wright, and published as the first volume of a Library of National Antiquities.  A new edition of this with sundry emendations and additions was prepared and published in 1884 by Professor R.F.  Wuelcker of Leipzig, and the collection is now generally referred to by scholars in German fashion under the designation of Wright-Wuelcker.