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John Considine, White Kennett. 2018. Etymological Collections of English Words and Provincial Expressions. Edited with an introduction and commentary by Javier Ruano-García, International Journal of Lexicography, Volume 33, Issue 4, December 2020, Pages 504–513, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/ecaa020
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1. ‘A universal English Glossary’
Here is a good question to ask a person interested in the history of English lexicography: in what decade did one English clergyman write to another of his hopes to collect ‘Materials for a universal English Glossary, or a Thesaurus Linguae Anglicanae’? I think that a sensible answer would be the 1840s or thereabouts. R. C. Trench referred, in his seminal On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries (1857: 52), to ‘that Lexicon totius Anglicitatis, which we justly desire’; Peter Gilliver points (2016: 9) to instances of the same phrase in 1848, and of ‘Dictionarium totius Anglicitatis’ in 1846, both used of imagined compilations from dialect collections; earlier still, although without the same emphasis on universality except in so far as it is implicit in the word Thesaurus, is Jonathan Boucher’s proposal of 1802 for a ‘Linguae Anglicanae Veteris Thesaurus’.1 The sensible answer would, however, be wrong – and indeed, it would be a surprisingly long way off the mark. The decade was the 1690s, the precise date being 8 November 1696, when White Kennett, vicar of Ambrosden in Oxfordshire and rector of Shottesbrooke in Berkshire, wrote as follows in a letter to the learned George Hickes:
