Medium description: | Nathan Bailey's 'Universal Etymological English Dictionary' published.
About 40,000 words and 950 pages. 30 editions published with a gradual increase of the wordlist to 50,000 in the 1783 edition. Includes history of the English Language in the introduction. However, the majority of the introduction is devoted to a discussion of etymology. This interest in etymology, and its systematic treatment in the definitions, is more advanced than his predecessors (Starnes & Noyes, 1991).
Borrowed most words from Kersey's "Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum" and Kersey-Phillips "World of Words", either the 1706 or 1720 edition (Starnes & Noyes, 1991); Anglo-Saxon words and English names and place names from Skinner; some rural terms from Coles; and proverbs from Dyke and Ray.
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