Nathan Bailey

Life

Bailey was a Seventh Day Baptist, admitted 1691 to a congregation in Whitechapel, London. He was probably excluded from the congregation by 1718. Later he had a school at Stepney. William Thomas Whitley attributes to him a degree of LL.D.

Works

Bailey, with John Kersey the younger, was a pioneer of English lexicography, and changed the scope of dictionaries of the language. Greater comprehensivity became the common ambition. Up to the early eighteenth century, English dictionaries had generally focused on "hard words" and their explanation, for example those of Thomas Blount and Edward Phillips in the generation before. With a change of attention, to include more commonplace words and those not of direct interest to scholars, the number of headwords in English dictionaries increased spectacularly. Innovations were in the areas of common words, dialect, technical terms, and vulgarities.

Bailey's An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, from its publication in 1721, became the most popular English dictionary of the 18th century, and went through nearly thirty editions. containing many technical terms.

Samuel Johnson made an interleaved copy the foundation of his own Johnson's Dictionary. In all, thirty editions of the dictionary appeared, the last at Glasgow in 1802, in reprints and versions by different booksellers.

Bailey's dictionary was also the basis of English-German dictionaries. These included those edited by Theodor Arnold (3rd edition, 1761), Anton Ernst Klausing (8th edition, 1792), and Johann Anton Fahrenkrüger (11th edition, 1810).

Bailey also published a spelling-book in 1726; All the Familiar Colloquies of Erasmus Translated (1733), of which a new edition appeared in 1878; 'The Antiquities of London and Westminster,' 1726; 'Dictionarium Domesticum,' 1736 (which was also a cookbook on recipes, including fried chicken); Selections from Ovid and Phædrus; and 'English and Latin Exercises.' In 1883 appeared 'English Dialect Words of the Eighteenth Century as shown in the . . . Dictionary of N. Bailey', with an introduction by W. E. A. Axon (English Dialect Society), giving biographical and bibliographical details.

List of selected works

References

Bibliography

• Jonathon Green, Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made (1996) Attribution:
• Selected headwords from Bailey's Dictionary, 1736 edition

References

1. {{Cite EB1911
2. (1908). "The Dictionary of National Biography". Smith, Elder & Co..
3. (1946). "The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson 1604-1755". University of North Caroline Press.
4. (1996). "Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made". Henry Holt & Co..
5. (2000). "The Oxford Companion to English Literature". Oxford University Press.
6. Hancher, Michael. "Bailey, Nathaniel".
7. Green, p. 226.
8. [[Thomas Chatterton]], the literary forger, also obtained many sham-antique words from reading Bailey and Kersey.{{cite DNB|wstitle=Bailey, Nathan}}
9. It was a successor to Kersey's ''[[A New English Dictionary]]'' (1702), and drew on it. A supplementary volume of his dictionary appeared in 1727, and in 1730 a folio edition, the ''[[Dictionarium Britannicum]]'''Dictionarium Britannicum, collected by several hands. The Mathematical part by G. Gordon, the Botanical by P. Miller. The whole revis'd and improv'd with many thousand additions by N. Bailey.'
10. Desiderius Erasmus, ''[https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1854 The Colloquies of Erasmus]'', trans. by Nathan Bailey, ed. by E. Johnson, 2 vols (London: Reeves and Turner, 1878).
11. Pereira, Alyssa. (22 June 2016). "The internet is obsessing over this 18th century fried chicken recipe". [[San Francisco Chronicle]].