Welcome to a collection of excerpts from Nathan Bailey's English Dictionary, as prepared by Liam Quin, liamquin at interlog dot com. The dictionary itself is marked up in SGML, and you will want an SGML-aware browser, such as SoftQuad Panorama, in order to proceed much further.
There is also an experimental HTML version using forms.
You can view the dictionary entries a letter at a time (e.g. all the words beginning with `W'), and you can also view everything available (200K). There is a transcription of the title page, and also most of the preface to the dictionary, although I haven't typed all of this yet.
I have a copy of the Second Edition (1736) of the dictionary. This is listed as OCLC No. 14302760. It's a Folio, and collates as follows, if I get this right, all in fours: [a] [B-I,K-T,V,X-Z], [A2-H2,2I,2K-2U,2X-2Z], [A3-H3,3I,3K-3U,3X-3Z], [A4-H4,4I,4K-4U,4X-4Z], [5A-5F], [4L-4U,4X,4Y,4Z], [6A-6I,6K-6U,6X-6Z], [7A-7I,7K-7U,7X-7Z], [8A-8I,8K-8U,8X-8Z], [9A-9I,9K-9U,9X-9Z], [8A-8I,8K-8U,8X-8Z], [9A-9D], Appendixes [9E-9F]. That gives a total of lots of pages.
There are references in the text to some plates, with figures one to twelve, but there is no evidence that the plates were ever present. Since the front cover is detached, it is possible that there was a full-page plate tipped in as it were a frontispiece, but there is no evidence of this, and it seems unlikely. All references to figures on plates cease part-way through the dictionary, so it seems likely that the plates were never included. There is a large plate tipped in at Orrerry, however.
The excerpts here represent less than 1% of the text of the dictionary, and were marked up in SGML by Liam Quin, using SoftQuad Author/Editor. The document has been carefully proofread, but there are certain to be some errors left. Please do feel free to send these to liamquin at interlog dot com, but before you do, please remember that many words were written diffrently in the eighteenth century, and also that it was not considered necessary to spell the same word in the same way everywhere it was used. Somehow, perhaps, life was more fun then.
It should be remembered that this work was done for pleasure, and is not in any way intended as a formal critical edition. In particular, very few of the definitions are included! The book is folio, so that there are two leaves (four pages) in each signature. Currently, there is at least one definition from each signature, with very few exceptions. However, there can be anywhere up to a hundred or so definitions on a page, so I have maybe typed between one and two percent of the dictionary.
I have been fairly sloppy about the markup of this document; it needs a proof-read, and also needs a reworking of the DTD.
On the prrof-reading front, I have no excuse, except to say that every definition has been read at least twice against the original, and most several times. There are many spellings and variant forms that would not be acceptable today, and I have retained these.
The DTD is one that I invented. It predates the Text Encoding Initiative's fascicle on dictionaries by several years, although in any case the TEI's proposed dictionary markup is still (Spring 1995) largely untested, and does not capture as much information as the markup I am using.
Some specific areas of weakness in the markup, and specific notes, follow.
The font changes in the dictionary have been marked in various ways:
In addition, I have interpreted font changes within Etymologies, as described under Etymologies below.
I have used <P> in the Preface, but in the body of the dictionary itself, it somehow seemed as though the groupings of text in the longer entries (such as Action and Earthquake) were not really paragraphs in the normal sense. The first such lump of text is run on after the headword, and it's hard to distinguish lists, paragraphs, subentries and so forth. In the end, I decided to be conservative, and have used a <TEXT> element instead of <P> in the main text; I have not used separate markup for numbered lists and so forth, instead placing the numbers in the text. This is clearly unsatisfactory, but I am unable at present to determine an unambiguous structure for the text. I strongly suspect that it isn't regular. Uppercase Letters at the Start of each Noun are used (as was common at the time), but only up until signature 3H or so. There are a number of other structural irreglarities, such as whether square or round brackets are used round an etymology or usage note (as in [with Chymists]), and I have guessed that when they are omitted, the compositor may simply have run out of little metal brackets! In at least one case I have inserted the markup as if the brackets and italics were there, although I'd have preferred to encode somehow that that's what I did.
My markup for an Etymology has several problems:
In the etymologies, the words from various language are marked as follows: words in Latin and Latinate languages are generally in an Italic face; Old English uses a Saxon face rather like that on William Caslon's specimen sheet; Danish, Dutch and `Su.' use a Blackletter face, as does German (but not a Fraktur, it's the same Old English face in all cases). I am not sure which language is represented by Su., as it could be short for a word beginning with `Su', `Sv', or `Sw', because of the Orthography of the time. Brit. also uses Old English, in Gale and probably elsewhere.
In the main body of the dictionary, a few words are collated out of sequence, and I have retained this. The letters U and V collate as if they were the same letter, so that Venture is defined before Under. Sometimes in the text a v is used for a u, or the other way round, and sometimes vv is used for w; this was common practice in the seventeenth Century, and not in any way remarkable even in 1736. The letters I and J are treated in the same way.
Inline images are included as an entity inside an IMAGE element; the entity is declared using a NOTATION to be a GIF image, and names a file that's a small icon of the image. The Image element also has a URL-valued attribute that points to the full-sized image.
The images were scanned with a Mustek 800dpi hand-held monchrome scanner; the scans are generally not of very high quality, and in some cases may be distorted. None the less, they do give an idea of what the printed image looks like. I have coloured some of them slightly yellow, to match the printed page!
If you want to use any of these images, please give credit to Liam Quin for scanning them and making them available, to SoftQuad for letting me put them up on the Web server, and to Nathan Bailey for having them made, back in the early eighteenth century.
The DTD contains comments about individual elements and attributes.
There are still quite a few things not marked up, such as cross references and more complex idiom groups; fractions and lists have only been added recently.
I am afraid that i have avoided entries that were hard to type, and also entries that seemed pedestrian in meaning or writing, so that my sample is not representative of the dictionary as a whole.
It should be remembered that this work was done for pleasure, and is not in any way intended as a formal critical edition. In particular, very few of the definitions are included! The book is folio, so that there are two leaves (four pages) in each signature. Currently, there is at least one definition from each signature, with very few exceptions. However, there can be anywhere up to a hundred or so definitions on a page, so I have maybe typed between one and two percent of the dictionary.
Really, I'd like to link some of these definitions to words in later editions of Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological Dictionary, and perhaps also to other dictionaries, such as Johnson's (which mentions Bailey in the preface).
Probably, the next major revision will mark up much more of the semantics of etymologies. I am leaning toward more interpretation in etymologies, and less interpretation in the main text. I don't know if that's a good idea, but it's fun.