Notes on eighteenth-century dictionary grammars

As the volume of new dictionaries and grammars surged during the eighteenth century, one of the natural by‐products was the introduction of brief grammars as part of the preliminaries of dictionaries. This paper looks at what these grammars were like, what purposes they served, who wrote them and how much copying was involved in their production. The argument is made that dictionary grammars were often included for the added value they brought to the books as products, and not for the purpose of providing readers with thorough grammatical knowledge.