Etymological Collections of English Words and Provincial Expressions

This book is the first critical edition of White Kennett's Etymologicon Anglicanum (British Library, MS Lansdowne 1033), a long forgotten etymological compilation of the late 1690s with a substantial amount of regional dialect material. The work drew the attention of dialect lexicographers of the nineteenth century, such as Joseph Wright, and serves as documentary evidence for the OED.

This new scholarly edition of Kennett's glossary is divided into two parts. The first includes a detailed introduction that situates Kennett in the context of his time and of historical antiquarian scholarship. Javier Ruano-Garcia also describes the manuscript and Kennett's method, paying close attention to the regional dialect element and its lasting lexicographical impact. Part II contains the annotated edition of the text with a substantial commentary on its dialect material. The edition also offers a critical apparatus that records Kennett's many alterations to the glossary so that readers are able to see him at work and make sense of the process of compilation.

Javier Ruano-Garcia is Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics in the Department of English Philology at the University of Salamanca. His main research interests include historical regional lexicography, historical dialectology of the early and late modern English periods, and corpus linguistics. He is the author of Early Modern Northern English Lexis: A Literary Corpus-Based Study (Peter Lang, 2010) and is one of the compilers of The Salamanca Corpus: A Digital Archive of English Dialect Texts.