A historical or etymological dictionary shows the history of a word from its date of introduction to the present. It traces the development of various changes in interpretation and meaning. Etymologies frequently show the root word in Latin, Greek, Old English, French, etc.
There are a few key points in favor of the "bone fire" etymology. First, the creation posited by early lexicographers would be a somewhat unusual hybrid: exactly why a French word would be joined with an English one (the word fire is purely Anglo-Saxon) is hard to rationalize. Second, knowing that the word goes back to the 15th century, we might expect it to have evolved to boonfire, since boon (as in "boon companion") is the English form that developed from the French bon. Third, the spelling in the word's earliest attestation is in the form banefyre, and bane is a spelling of bone which long continued common in Scotland.
Electronic Access to the premier English language dictionary. Includes complete definitions with an etymology or history of each word. Extensive use of quotations from literature to show proper usage.
Although the OED is the best-known historical dictionary, it is not the only one. Specialized dictionaries, some now online, examine particular chronological periods, registers, or geographical regions. Currently at the letter G, Dictionary of Old English, edited by Antonette diPaolo Healey, defines words for the period from 600 to 1150. To date, the largest complete dictionary of Old English remains that of Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, first published in 1898 with a supplement in 1921.
Finally, there are etymological dictionaries, less concerned with usage than with origins. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, edited by C. T. Onions with G. W. S. Friedrichsen and R. W. Burchfield, is a comprehensive work giving brief accounts of the origins and history of more than 38,000 words. The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, edited by Robert Barnhart and Sol Steinmetz, which boasts that it is based on American scholarship, gives etymologies of about 30,000 words. The difference between a slang dictionary and an etymological one can be found in entries like that of cool, which Barnhart straightforwardly explains as having developed from Old English cōl. The Historical Dictionary of American Slang, by contrast, devotes two pages to the development of the various senses of the word.
Edit: To clarify, I'm interested in the chronology rather than repute or popularity. Which dialect had its modern (by which I mean contemporary, present-day) spellings published or released in a dictionary first?
The Nostratic Dictionary testifies to Dolgopolsky's significant research results contributing to Afro-Asiatic etymology, which is until now hindered by a number of objective circumstances: (1) even we ourselves in the Moscow school only have a general working hypothesis on the basic consonantal correspondences (esp. in the relationship of Proto-Semitic, Egyptian, and Proto-Berber), which have not yet been satisfactorily elaborated and thoroughly tested in all details (esp. in the least explored Omotic and Chadic daughter languages). (2) Secondly, it has always been - almost irrespectively of the individual authors (albeit in different degrees) - difficult in our etymological research, especially in the case of Semitic and Egyptian, to keep a balance between the philological background of our comparanda and their external parallels. Dolgopolsky has worked carefully in order to minimize these unavoidable negative effects. My comments to the following etymological entries that were selected at random mostly carry additional data, new cognates, which signifies the still unexploited immense treasure and possibilities in our domain. May this discussion gain new friends for Nostratic studies and Afro-Asiatic etymology!
A few facts make OED2 intertextuality a special case, overlapping with cases of attribution or allusion, but not identical to these. For one, OED2 is already a multiauthored and intertextual text, written and compiled by hundreds of lexicographers over more than a hundred years, following varying practices and relying on thousands of sources comprising millions of quotations. Secondly, though OED2 carries linguistic information (such as pronunciations, etymologies, definitions, etc.) as well as historical usage information (in the quotations) about every English word that is likely to occur in a poem or anywhere else, it is not often the only text to carry any one subset of this information. This means that finding OED2 in poems may point to another source for a poetic passage than (just) OED2 itself. Comparing the etymology field of a word in OED2 to its occurrence in a poetic text, for instance, might point to an etymological play on words, without conclusively attributing this to OED2. Or comparing the quotation fields may suggest an allusion to a text that happens to be quoted in OED2, even if OED2 is not itself the source of the allusion. But it may also point to true influence, in the form of a poetic allusion or reference which has been occasioned by OED2 and not the original text. I will discuss, with the help of preliminary results, the value and implications of each type of discovery, and ways of differentiating among these possibilities when appropriate. This is, I will argue, a discussion which takes up the crucial question of how, and to what extent, computing technologies can benefit the field of literary criticism, as a species of literary scholarship with its own goals and commitments.
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