General explanations (continued)

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Main words (continued)

III. The signification, or senses. Some words have only one invariable signification; but most words that have been used for any length of time in a language have acquired a long and sometimes intricate series of significations, as the primitive sense has been gradually extended to include allied or associated ideas, or transferred boldly to figurative and analogical uses. This happens to a greater extent with relational words, as prepositions (cf. about, after, against, and, anent) than with notional words, as verbs and nouns; of theses, also, it affects verbs and adjectives more than substantives; of substantives, it influences those which express action, qualities, and mental conceptions (cf. account), more than those which name, and are, as it were, fixed to material objects. Yet even these latter have often acquired many different senses. Thus, board names a material object; yet compare: a thin board, a frugal board, a card-board, board and lodgings, passengers on board, to fall over board, to sit at the council board, a board school, the Board of Trade, to tread the boards, a sea-board parish.

The order in which these senses were developed is one of the most important facts in the history of the word; to discover and exhibit it are among the most difficult duties of a dictionary which aims at giving this history. If the historical record were complete, that is, if we possessed written examples of all the uses of each word from the beginning, the simple exhibition of these would display a rational or logical development. The historical record is not complete enough to do this, but it is usually sufficient to enable us to infer the actual order. In exhibiting this in the Dictionary, that sense is placed first which was actually the earliest in the language: the others follow in the order in which they appear to have arisen. As, however, the development often proceeded in many branching lines, sometimes parallel, often divergent, it is evident that it cannot be adequately represented in a single linear series. Hence, while the senses are numbered straight on 1, 2, 3, etc., they are also grouped under branches marked I, II, III, etc., in each of which the historical order begins afresh. Subdivisions of the senses, varieties of construction, etc., are marked a, b, c, etc.; subdivisions of these, used especially for sense-divisions under combinations and derivatives, (a), (b), (c), or (i), (ii), (iii), etc.

So far for words of which the senses have been developed in English itself. But in adopted or adapted words which had already acquired various significations in the language (e.g. Latin) from which they were taken, it often happens that the order in which the senses appeared in English does not agree with the natural order in which they were developed in the original language. The English order is in fact accidental. For it was not in the primary sense that the word was first taken into English, but in a figurative, transferred, or specialized use, as an ecclesiastical, legal, grammatical, or medical term, which perhaps took root in our language, and here received a development of its own. Subsequently, however, familiarity with the Latin language and literature sometimes led to a fresh adoption of the word in the primary sense, or to a sudden extension of English usage, so as to include the primary sense, which thus appears as of quite late origin in English. In such a case it is not possible to make the historical order of the senses in English agree with the logical order in which they arose in Latin or other previous language; and every such word must be treated in the way which seems best suited to exhibit the facts of its own history and use. Instances of such words are afforded by ADVENT, AGONY, ANNUNCIATION, APPEND.

Obsolete senses, like obsolete words, have prefixed, so as to be at once distinguished from those now in use. Under ¶ are included catachrestic and erroneous uses, confusions, and the like.

To a great extent the explanations of the meanings, or definitions, have been framed anew upon a study of all the quotations for each word collected for this work, of which those printed form only a small part. But the labours of other scholars in this, the most successfully cultivated department of English lexicography, have not been neglected. In particular, the explanations of Dr Johnson and of his editor Archdeacon Todd have often been adopted unchanged (within inverted commas and marked J. or T.), as have those of N. Bailey, and other early lexicographers, to whom it is only right to give credit for original

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