The English Dialect Dictionary facts for kids

The English Dialect Dictionary (often called the EDD) is the biggest dictionary ever made about English words used in different parts of the country. It was put together by Joseph Wright (1855–1930), a language expert from Yorkshire. He had a lot of help from his team and his wife, Elizabeth Mary Wright (1863–1958).

The dictionary mainly covers words used between 1700 and 1903. But because Wright was also interested in history, many entries include information about even older versions of these words, going back to Old English and Middle English. Wright worked with hundreds of people who knew these local words. He also used thousands of written sources, like word lists from the English Dialect Society and books written in dialect.

Unlike many other word collectors, Wright used a very careful and scholarly method. He always showed where his information came from. For a long time, people didn't pay much attention to the nearly 80,000 words in the EDD. But now, thanks to EDD Online, a project from Innsbruck University, everyone can easily explore this amazing dictionary. The online version first came out in 2012 and has been updated many times since.

Joseph Wright: From Donkey-Boy to Professor

Did you know that in Great Britain, going to school wasn't required until 1870? Joseph Wright was born in 1850 into a poor family. This meant he couldn't go to school until he was about 14 or 15 years old.

When he was a child, he had to work hard. He was a "donkey-boy" in a stone quarry and later worked in a factory. But Joseph was determined to learn! He taught himself to read and write all by himself. He then started learning on a huge scale, going to night schools. Soon, he became very good at Latin, German, and other languages, including Gothic and Middle English.

After studying in Germany for over six years, he worked his way up through different teaching jobs. He became a Deputy Professor and then the secretary of the English Dialect Society. Finally, in 1900, he was chosen to be a full Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford. This happened while he was busy publishing parts of his English Dialect Dictionary.

After Joseph Wright passed away in 1930, his wife, Elizabeth Mary Wright, wrote a book about his life. It told the amazing story of his journey "from donkey-boy to professor." It also shared the challenges he faced while creating and publishing the English Dialect Dictionary.

How the English Dialect Dictionary Was Published

Before the first part of the dictionary came out in 1898, many people doubted Joseph Wright. They weren't sure if the project was important enough for academics or if it could even be paid for. The English Dialect Society had collected a lot of dialect words. But no publisher, not even Oxford University Press, wanted to take on the financial risk of such a huge dictionary.

Also, no well-known professor wanted to do the massive amount of hard work needed for the project. However, Professor Walter William Skeat, who started the English Dialect Society, had created a special fund in 1886. He put almost half of his own money into it! This fund helped to start collecting and organizing the words for the dictionary. Later, Arthur Balfour, who was a top government official at the time, gave a grant from the Royal Bounty Fund. This money helped to finish the work.

After years of worrying and discussions, Wright finally decided to publish the dictionary himself. He would sell it by subscription, meaning people would pay for it in advance. This plan required a huge effort to promote the dictionary and get important people and scholars to subscribe. He found more supporters, like Clarendon Press, which gave him rooms to work in. But he still had to pay for some of the project himself.

Henry Frowde, who used to work for Oxford University Press, became the publisher. The six large volumes came out one by one over eight years, from 1898 to 1905. They were announced as "the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the last two hundred years." The dictionary was based on the English Dialect Society's work and lots of new material.

The content was released in 28 smaller parts. These parts were meant to be bound into the six main volumes. Volume 6 includes a list of all the sources Wright used, organized by county.

What's Inside the Dictionary

The EDD has nearly 80,000 entries for dialect words. About 10,000 of these were added in a special supplement. The entries are different lengths. Some are just quick cross-references, while others are detailed analyses of dialect words that go on for several pages.

The real value of the dictionary is in all the information packed into each entry. It tells you:

• How the word is used.
• How it's pronounced and spelled.
• What it means.
• Examples from thousands of sources.
• How the word was formed (like compound words or common phrases).
• Where in the UK and even worldwide the word was used.

The dictionary is also very careful to include information about the history of dialect words. This includes where they came from (etymology) and how their forms changed (morphology).

You can get an idea of how big the dictionary is by looking at these online versions of the six volumes:

• Volume 1: A-C
• Volume 2: D-G
• Volume 3: H-L
• Volume 4: M-Q
• Volume 5: R-S
• Volume 6: T-Z (This one also has corrections, the supplement, a list of books used, and a grammar section.)

Because of its huge size and the time it was put together, the dictionary is a very important book for studying the history of dialects. Wright himself made notes and corrections in a special copy of the first edition. This copy is now kept with his other papers at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.

The English Dialect Grammar

The sixth volume of the dictionary includes a section called the English Dialect Grammar. This part was also published as a separate book. It lists 16,000 dialect forms and has two main sections:

• Phonology: This explains how sounds in dialects developed over time.
• Accidence: This gives details about grammar, especially how words change their forms (like verb endings or plural nouns).

Compared to Alexander John Ellis's huge work on Early English Pronunciation, Volume V, Wright's Grammar is much shorter. The descriptive part is only 82 pages long. However, it's followed by more than a hundred pages of an index. This index connects words to the specific dialect areas where they are used.

In his introduction, Wright said that he mostly followed Dr. Ellis's way of classifying dialects. Wright also used some of Ellis's information about phonetic details. Some language experts have criticized Wright for this. They said he used Ellis's data but then used less precise ways to write down sounds and described areas vaguely, unlike Ellis who was very exact.

Even though the Grammar used ideas from many earlier scholars, it also added a lot of new information because it was created alongside the EDD. One expert, G.L. Brook, said the Grammar was "less satisfactory" than the English Dialect Dictionary itself.

EDD Online: The Innsbruck Project

The English Dialect Dictionary Online (EDD Online) is a computer version of Wright's dictionary. It's a database and software started by Manfred Markus at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. Work on this project has been going on since 2006. The latest version, 4.0, was released in March 2023: EDD Online 4.0.

You can find scanned copies of the dictionary from libraries on the Internet Archive. But these versions only let you search for words alphabetically or do full-text searches. Also, Wright's corrections and the 170-page Supplement are easy to miss because they aren't fully integrated into the six printed volumes.

With the EDD Online system, users can look for different language features in the dictionary's text, not just the main words. This lets them find specific information based on the entire EDD. Similar to the online version of the OED (the Oxford English Dictionary), EDD Online lets you use many different search options. For example, you can search for compound words or different spellings. You can also filter by areas or time periods.

A book by Manfred Markus published in 2021 explains all the amazing things you can do with EDD Online. It also talks about how it's changing the way we study English dialects.

See also

• Dictionary of American Regional English