Poetry & the Dictionary

Poetry is an ancient verbal art, which has its roots in the oral epics and fragments that survive from classical times. Dictionaries of English, by contrast, are a comparatively recent phenomenon, beginning with the ‘hard words’ that Robert Cawdrey gathered in A Table Alphabeticall in 1604 and extending to the present edition of the Oxford English Dictionary , with its ongoing revisions. This innovative collection of essays is the first volume to explore the ways in which dictionaries have stimu