Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
If you would like to write a summary for this topic, email phil [at] gyford [dot] com
ENGLISH: CAMBRIDGE Dictionaries Online http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
ENGLISH: Ask OXFORD.com
http://www.askoxford.com/
AMERICAN: Webster’s Unabridged 1913
“109,562 entries”
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/forms_unrest/webster.form.html
ENGLISH: SLANG Dictionary, 18th Century
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/dict2/
“CANTING DICTIONARY, 1736”
“A Collection of the Canting Words and Terms, both ancient and modern, used by Beggars, Gypsies, Cheats, House-Breakers, Shop-Lifters, Foot-Pads, Highway-Men &c. [and, let’s hope, Pepys]”
“Taken from the Universal Etymological English Dictionary, by N. Bailey, London, 1737, Vol II”
AMERICAN: Meriam-Webster online
http://www.m-w.com/
AMERICAN Heritage Dictionary
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary
ENGLISH: Expressions & Sayings Dict.
http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/sayings.htm#Sayings
AMERICAN — Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable
http://www.bartleby.com/81/
“… comprises over 18,000 entries that reveal the etymologies, trace the origins and otherwise catalog ‘words with a tale to tell.’” (1898 edition)
ENGLISH English vs. American English
http://www.accomodata.co.uk/amlish.htm
This site might be useful in interpreting an odd word used by an American or Briton posting an annotation. This is an easy-to-read parallel listing of different words with the same meaning — American on the left, English on the right, on one long web page. Not absolutely foolproof: “crazy bone” for example, is supposed to be the American equivalent of the English “funny bone,” but I’ve always heard “funny bone” used here in the Northeastern U.S. “Crazy bone” is probably used somewhere else in the country.
More Brit/Yank Translation Aids:
This site has explanations and notes some Canadian usages:
http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~jphb/american.html
One-way translation: Brit English for Yanks:
http://www.effingpot.com/
To use this one, click on an item from the list of subjects down the left side of the web page: slang, “people,” motoring, clothing, “around the house,” food & drink, “odds & sods.”
This also exists:
http://www.travelfurther.net/dictionaries/
World Wide Words
A big and entertaining site on the histories of various words and expressions, with a British English perspective.
AUSTRALIAN — Macquarie Dictionary
http://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/
(For Australian slang, click on “Book of Slang.”)
There doesn’t seem to be a key online to the pronunciation symbols used in the dictionary.
Why an Australian dictionary? Oz may be on the other side of the planet from Pepys, but word meanings and traditions may be present there that have died out elsewhere, and some of our annotators have been Australian.
Latin-English, English-Latin
http://www.sunsite.ubc.ca/LatinDictionary/
Tidy site. No “submit” button, just type in the word and use your “enter” key.
OED
Just out of curiosity I ran a search through the quotations on my OED-CD looking for Pepys and found the SP has 1,890 quotes attributed to him. To place this in context I checked Sharespeare. No contest. Shakes shows up 29,297 times.
Canting Dictionary, 1736
A Collection of the Canting Words and Terms, both ancient and modern, used by Beggars, Gypsies, Cheats, House-Breakers, Shop-Lifters, Foot-Pads, Highway-Men, &c;
“Taken from The Universal Etymological English Dictionary, by N. Bailey, London, 1737, Vol. II, and transcrib’d into XML Most Diligently by Liam Quin”
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/dict2/
Great for finding some esoteric word-meanings. It may well have been in SP’s Library.
Apologies David
I missed your reference to “Canting Dictionary” above.
TRANSLATION site: Altavista’s Babelfish
http://babelfish.altavista.com/
French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portugese, Russian to English or vice-versa (also Chinese, Japanese and Korean). You can translate a whole block of text or a web page.
“Cotgrave
Alan Bedford on Sun 14 Mar 2004, 1:08 am | Link
A very complete list of Latin abbreviations
http://asgle.classics.unc.edu/abbrev/latin/
“Pepysian”s rejoice! A sidebar in the September 2005 “OED News” e-letter
http://www.oed.com/newsletters/2005-09/
shows that the “OED Online” now includes the word “Pepysian.” No doubt it is presented in its adjectival form; but if Austen can have her Janeites, and Henry James his Jacobeans, surely, dear readers and annotators, there deserves to be a noun for us Pepysians.
Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall (1604)
Bodleian Library, editor The First English Dictionary, 1604: Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall. Introduction by John Simpson. Distributed for the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 200 p. 5 x 7-3/4
Cloth NAM $24.00 ISBN: 978-1-85124-385-3 (ISBN-10: 1-85124-385-2) Spring 2007
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/230289.ctl
www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/pubs/publist.pdf
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