Trench, then Dean of
Westminster, who had already written several esteemed works on the
English language and the history of words, read two papers before the
Philological Society in London 'On some Deficiencies in existing
English Dictionaries,' in which, while speaking with much appreciation
of the labours of Dr. Johnson and his successors, he declared that
these labours yet fell far short of giving us the ideal English
Dictionary. Especially, he pointed out that for the _history_ of words
and families of words, and for the changes of form and sense which
words had historically passed through, they gave hardly any help
whatever. No one could find out from all the dictionaries extant how
long any particular word had been in the language, which of the many
senses in which many words were used was the original, or how or when
these many senses had been developed; nor, in the case of words
described as _obsolete_, were we told _when_ they became obsolete or
by whom they were last used. He pointed out also that the obsolete and
the rarer words of the language had never been completely collected;
that thousands of words current in the literature of the past three
centuries had escaped the diligence of Johnson and all his
supplementers; that, indeed, the collection of the requisite material
for a complete dictionary could not be compassed by any one man,
however long-lived and however diligent, but must be the work of many
collaborators who would undertake systematically to read and to
extract English literature.
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