Historical dictionary

A historical dictionary or dictionary on historical principles is a type of dictionary which deals not only with the present-day meanings of words but also the historical development of their forms and meanings. It may also describe the vocabulary of an earlier stage of a language's development without covering present-day usage at all. A historical dictionary is primarily of interest to scholars of language, but may also be used as a general dictionary or by those who are casually interested in understanding a word's development over time.

Typical features of a historical dictionary are:

However, not all dictionaries which are called 'historical' have all of these features. For example, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary includes only minimal quotations, with most entries having only an approximate date of first use, and the Webster's New International Dictionary (which, though it does not market itself as historical, is founded on historical principles) features only dates of first use and does not order its senses chronologically.

For some languages, like Sanskrit and Greek, the historical dictionary (in the sense of a word-list explaining the meanings of words that were obsolete at the time of their compilation) was the first form of dictionary developed; though not being scholarly historical dictionaries in the modern sense, they did give a sense of semantic change over time. Early modern European dictionaries also often included a significant historical element, without being fully historical in form; for instance, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) included quotations from admired writers as well as some words that were obsolete or obsolescent by the mid 18th century.

Modern historical principles emerged fully with the publication of John Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808). Like modern historical dictionaries, Jamieson attempted to find the earliest use of each word, and printed quotations in chronological order demonstrating the changes which had occurred to that word throughout history.

In 1812 the German classicist Franz Passow laid out his plan for a comprehensive dictionary of the Greek language which would 'set out […] the life story of each single word in a conveniently ordered overviews', which was completed as the Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache in 1824. This idea was transmitted to the English-speaking world through the work of Liddell and Scott on their Greek–English Lexicon (1843), based on a translation of Passow's work into English. However, it was not until the beginning of the Deutsches Wörterbuch project of the Brothers Grimm in 1838 that a historical dictionary of a modern language was attempted.

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