Volume 32, Issue 2016

The first monolingual dictionaries of English shared a simple microstructural principle: each entry treated one word. Elisha Coles’s English Dictionary (1676) was the first to group related words together in linked entries. Concerning the point, I (2012) have shown that three quarters of the words in these linked entries had been registered in earlier English dictionaries, especially Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1656). However, this leaves two crucial questions unexamined. First, how did Coles develop the technique of holding these entries together with linking phrases? Second, how did he search for the words which appear in his linked entries and not in previous English dictionaries? From an overall viewpoint, answers to the two questions are judged to lie in Coles’s fresh awareness of word classes, especially of the noun and the adjective, and creative use of the contents of English dictionaries in the 17th century before his.

The following report reflects on the activities and changes of EMLex concerning the implementation of the programme as an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree and gives a short overview over the international summer term which took place 2016 at the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary (Budapest).