Nobody did more than Joseph Wright to lay the foundation for the study of English dialects. His dictionary is an impressively detailed account of the regional vocabulary of the British Isles at that time. It claims to be ‘so far as is possible, the complete vocabulary of all dialect words which are still in use or are known to have been in use at any time during the last two hundred years in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales’. That’s quite a claim, but the entries certainly support it. There had never been such detail provided on dialect usage before. And only the great Survey of English Dialects, half a century later, would surpass it.
It took Wright twenty-three years to collect all the material, and seven years to publish it. Volume 1, A–C, appeared in 1898. Volume 6, T–Z, along with various indexes and a Dialect Grammar, appeared in 1905. The scale of the project, in a pre-computer age, has to be appreciated. The entire work presents around 117,500 senses of words. Examples of usage are taken from over 3,000 dialect glossaries, works containing dialect words, and the contributions of over 600 voluntary readers and correspondents, all of whom of course had to be contacted by letter. Some entries were easy to manage: a single query about an individual word or phrase. Others were highly complex. A form researching dialect variations in the verb ‘to be’ asked correspondents to respond to 194 separate points. The information, as it came in, was handwritten onto slips. By the time Wright had completed his first volume, he had already accumulated 1.5 million slips.
An impression of the scale and level of detail of the project can be gained from the facsimile page (from which I took my entry on apurt). It shows the many quotations, sources, cross-references, pronunciations, etymologies, and variant spellings, along with the geographical locations in England, Wales, Scotland, or Ireland. It also gives an impression of the range of subject-matter, which included scientific data on regional plants and animals, as well as descriptions of technical notions in such areas as mining and agriculture, and accounts of popular games, customs, and superstitions. The vocabulary of just one children’s game, marbles, runs to dozens of entries spread throughout the Dictionary.
Notwithstanding all this detail, it’s important to appreciate the limitations of Wright’s work. In particular, his geographical coverage reflects the dialect publications he consulted and the places where his correspondents lived. Some locations, such as Scotland and Yorkshire, get very detailed treatment as a result. In others, the treatment is much more sporadic. When Wright identifies apurt as being used in Devon and Somerset, for example, all this means is that he has hard evidence of it being used there. It doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been used in Cornwall, or Dorset, or anywhere else. When reading the entries in his Dictionary, or those in the present book, it’s important to appreciate that a usage may have been more widespread than he was able to discover. In the entries below, the regions listed immediately after the signpost symbol show where Wright found the headword in use. Any other regions mentioned within the entry refer to related words.