Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made

This book, which its author, a London dictionary editor, describes as ""a little flesh on lexicographical bones,"" offers readers everything they could want to know about dictionaries, as well as what many would never think of asking. This ""universe in alphabetical order,"" as Anatole France put it, exists in nearly nine of every 10 American homes. One encounters in this work the quirky, obsessive makers of the Dictionarium, the Glossographia, the Ortis Vocabularium, the Medulla grammatica, the Promptorium parvulorum, the Medulla grammatica, the Worde of Wordes, the Abecdearium, the Manipulus Vocabulorum, the Bibliotheca Scholastica and other anticipations of the one essential book. Eventually Green gets around to the celebrated, idiosyncratic Samuel Johnson and the American monomaniacal crank Noah Webster, who remains a national institution. Green also deals at length with the burgeoning of slang and the dilemmas presented to lexicographers by once-taboo words. Despite some anecdotal trimmings, this is basically an encyclopedic work and, as such, will appeal only to the most dedicated of word nuts. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Oct.)