Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall holds a prominent place in the development of the dictionary in English; recognizing this, the original editors of the Oxford English Dictionary comment in their Historical Introduction that "To set Cawdrey's slim small volume of 1604 beside the completed Oxford Dictionary of 1933 is like placing the original acorn beside the oak that has grown out of it" (vi). To make even so humble a comparison is, perhaps, to exaggerate the lexicographical sophistication of English monolingual dictionaries at the time. Many were small glosses or lists of words, often specialized, which were defined briefly and usually by their synonyms. Cawdrey's Table, too, is a small dictionary by today's standards; the first edition contained only 2,543 headwords, and it grew in size with each of its three later editions (1609, 1613, 1617), ultimately to define 3,264 words. Yet Cawdrey's modest work of 1604 is the "first fully developed representative" of the monolingual English dictionary (Schäfer 1989: 7).

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Original publication information:

Originally published in Digital Studies/le Champ Numérique, (4)

Date: 1996

DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.206

License: (CC BY 4.0)

Original citation:

Siemens, R. G. (1996). The Acorn of the Oak: A Stylistic Approach to Lexicographical Method in Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall. Digital Studies/le Champ Numérique, (4). DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.206