Bailey, Nathanial

Dictionarium Britannicum: Or a More Compleat Universal Etymological English Dictionary Than Any Extant … Illustrated With Near Five Hundred Cuts … the Second Edition, With Numerous Additions and Improvements…

      London: for T. Cox, 1736. Folio, 4 preliminary leaves plus unpaginated lexicon in double column, illus. in the text (largely heraldic); 19th century half brown morocco over marbled boards; rubbed, corners bumped, mild dampstain pervades most of the foremargins and enters one column of the text, early erudite pencil markings, mostly confined to the margins; a good, sound copy. Assisted in the mathematical part by G. Gordon, in the botanical by P. Miller, and in the etymological by T. Lediard, Bailey has compiled "the most complete work of English lexicography before Johnson… [with] a scale of illustration … unprecedented in regular English lexicography" (Hancher). With a Preface (not included in the first edition of 1730), and with perhaps 12, 000 additional entries, including "cant, Eastern terms, variant forms, and oddities of all kinds…a tour de force…the last triumph which Bailey had the pleasure of seeing before his death in 1742" (see Starnes & Noyes, chapter XVI). Alston V, 137; Vancil, p. 12.