Table of Contents

Volume I: General-purpose Dictionaries
1: A. P. Cowie: Introduction
Part I. Early Glossaries; Bilingual, and Multilingual Dictionaries
2: Hans Sauer: Glosses, Glossaries, and Dictionaries in the Medieval Period
3: Janet Bately: Bilingual and Multilingual Dictionaries of the Renaissance and Early Seventeenth Century
4: Monique Cormier: Bilingual Dictionaries of the Late Seventeeth and Eighteenth Centuries
5: Carla Marello: Bilingual Dictionaries of the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Centuries
6: Donna Farina and George Durman: Bilingual Dictionaries of English and Russian in the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries
Part 2. The History of English Monolingual Dictionaries
7: Noel Osselton: The Early Development of the English Monolingual Dictionary Seventeenth and Early Eighteenthth Centuries
8: Allen Reddick: Johnson and Richardson
9: Sidney Landau: Major American Dictionaries
10: Lynda Mugglestone: The Oxford English Dictionary
11: Charlotte Brewer: The OED Supplements
12: Richard Bailey: National and Regional Dictionaries of English
13: Margaret Dareau and Iseabail Macleod: Dictionaries of Scots
14: Michael Adams: The Period Dictionaries
15: Jeannette Allsopp: Dictionaries of Caribbean English
16: Edmund Weiner: The Electronic OED: the computerization of a historical dictionary
References
Index of Names
Index of Subjects
Volume II: Specialized Dictionaries
Part 1. Dictionaries Specialized According to Ordering of Entries, Topical or Linguistic Content, or Speech Community
1: Werner Hüllen: Dictionaries of Synonyms and Thesauri
2: Michael Hoare: Scientific and Technical Dictionaries
3: Carole Hough: Dictionaries of Place-names
4: Patrick Hanks: Dictionaries of Personal Names
5: Joan Beal: Pronouncing Dictionaries - i Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
6: Beverley Collins and Inger Mees: Pronouncing Dictionaries - ii Mid to Late-Nineteenth Century
7: Thomas Herbst and Michael Klotz: Syntagmatic and Phraseological Dictionaries
8: Elizabeth Knowles: Dictionaries of Quotations
9: Anatoly Liberman: English Etymological Dictionaries
10: Robert Penhallurick: Dialect Dictionaries
11: Julie Coleman: Slang and Cant Dictionaries
Part 2. Dictionaries Specialized According to Uses and Users
12: Robert Allen: Dictionaries of Usage
13: Sidney Landau: The American Collegiate Dictionaries
14: A. P. Cowie: The Earliest Foreign Learners' Dictionaries
15: Thierry Fontenelle: Linguistic Research and Learner's Dictionaries: The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
16: Rosamund Moon: The Cobuild Project
17: Hilary Nesi: Dictionaries in Electronic Form
References
Index of Names
Index of Subjects

About the Author

A. P. Cowie is Honorary Reader in Lexicography at the University of Leeds. He was co-editor of the third edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and chief editor of the fourth edition. He is the co-editor of the Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms and was editor of the International Journal of Lexicography from 1998 to 2003. His books include English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: A History (OUP, 1999) and, as
editor, Phraseology: Theory, Analysis, and Applications (OUP, 1998). He is currently preparing the second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms by A. P. Cowie, R. Mackin, and I. R. McCaig.

Reviews

offers the most comprehensive treatment to date of the development of English lexicography from the Middle Ages to the present... OHEL has already earned its place in the lexicographic canon. These splendid two volumes will no doubt be cherished by generations of IJL readers.
*Areleta Adamska-Salaciak, International Journal of Lexicography*

my favourite book of this year, The Oxford History of English Lexicography. The essays in these two large volumes include pieces on the evolution of specialized dictionaries of science, technology and medicine.
*W. F. Bynum, Personal favourites of 2009, Nature*

...invaluable, for its well-chosen team of specialists have brought together more historical points of detail than ever before
*David Crystal, Times Literary Supplement*

It is safe to say that any future work on English lexicography will begin here, that anyone interested in how lexicography impinges on specific historical issues will consult here, and that any speaker interested in the quixotic project of defining the undefinable - English - will linger here.
*Tim William Machan, Marquette University, Milwaukee, writing for Journal of English Linguistics*