1992/01/01 by Michael Hancher · 1 voice · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Linguistics and Language Studies #Lexicography and Language Studies #Linguistics and language evolution
paper · doi:10.1080/02666286.1992.10435823
openalex publication_date 1992/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster share their preeminence in the history of English lexicography with a man now almost forgotten, who usually signed his books simply ‘N. Bailey’. Even in his lifetime, Nathan (possibly Nathaniel) Bailey was an obscure figure. There is a record of when he died (1742), but not of when he was born. He belonged to a Seventh Day Baptist congregation in Whitechapel.1 He published several Latin textbooks and translations, incidentally advertising the fact that he was a schoolmaster who learned his educational theories in the c1assroom.2 He may have begun his lexicographical labours with the unsigned Dictionarium rusticum, urbanicum & botanicum (1704; 3rd edition 1726);3 but only with An Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1721 did Bailey really enter literary history. That book long survived its author; dozens of editions appeared throughout the eighteenth century and even into the nineteenth. It was Bailey's dictionary of the English language that first made the use of such dictionaries popular.4