The Influence of Early Monolingual Dictionaries and Word Lists on the Standardisation of English Spelling

This paper aims to ascertain what direct influence the early monolingual word lists & dictionaries may have had on the standardization of English spelling. It is based upon a quantitative analysis of the spellings of lemmas from the nine earliest published lists & dictionaries (ranging from Mulcaster 1992 to Cockeram 1626), followed by a comparison of these lemmas & their spellings with the spellings from a manuscript & printed text of appropriate date (by William Cavedish, 1st Duke of Newcastle & dated circa 1659 & 1667, respectively). A qualitative investigation into the nature of the words & spellings occurring in the data reveals a high degree of consistency within & between the word lists & dictionaries & printed Newcastle text, but no significant correspondence between these spellings & those found in the manuscript. The research indicates that the spellings of the printed lists & text may be taken as the standard spellings of those words in that period (this includes both variable spellings & those which later changed into our present standard forms), but that the manuscript writing, at least in this case, remains largely unaffected by the standard. Whereas the lack of correspondence between these two bodies of data may be due to the sample of lay writing chosen, the lexical & grammatical restrictions of lemmas in word lists & dictionaries of this period set precise & important limits to the extent to which they can have directly influenced the course of spelling standardization. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document