The English Dialect Dictionary


The English Dialect Dictionary is a dictionary of English dialects, compiled by Joseph Wright.

Overview

published The English Dialect Dictionary, being the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the last two hundred years; founded on the publications of the English Dialect Society and on a large amount of material never before printed in 6 volumes between 1898 and 1905. Its compilation and printing was funded privately by Joseph Wright, a self-taught philologist at the University of Oxford.
The content was issued progressively as 28 parts intended for binding into the six volumes with publication dates of 1898, 1900, 1902, 1903, 1904 and 1905. Vol. 6 includes an invaluable list of writings in dialect arranged by counties.
Due to the scale of the work, 70,000 entries, and the period in which the information was gathered, it is regarded as a standard work in the historical study of dialect. Wright marked annotations and corrections in a cut-up and rebound copy of the first edition; this copy is among Wright's papers in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.
Innsbruck University has made available a digitized version of the EDD - free of charge for non-institutional, non-profit purposes. A scanned version of the work made by University of Toronto Library is currently available through the Internet Archive.

English Dialect Grammar

The sixth volume includes the English Dialect Grammar, which was also published separately. This included 16,000 dialectal forms across two main sections: 'Phonology', which gave a historical description of the development of sounds in dialect; and 'Accidence', which gave details on grammar and especially on morphology.
Among linguists, the Dialect Grammar has been criticised more than the Dialect Dictionary itself. Wright has been accused of borrowing material from the work of Alexander John Ellis that he had previously criticised. Peter Anderson claimed that Wright did Ellis a "disservice" by criticising the methods used in collecting data, but then using almost identical methods in English Dialect Grammar and taking on much of Ellis's data for his own work. Both Peter Anderson and Graham Shorrocks have argued that Wright distorted Ellis's data by using a less precise phonetic notation and using vague geographical areas rather than the precise locations given by Ellis. Helga Koekeritz stated that Wright's information on the Suffolk dialect was almost entirely derived from Ellis, and Warren Maguire has made similar comments about Wright's information on the north-east of England whilst also saying that the Grammar did introduce much new material.