Despite all the intellectual activity of the time there was in print no guide to the tongue, no linguistic vade mecum, no single book that Shakespeare or Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nash, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Izaak Walton, or any of their other learned contemporaries could consult.” Since there was no such phrase until the late seventeenth century, it follows that there was essentially no such concept either, certainly not at the time when Shakespeare was writing-a time when writers were writing furiously, and thinkers thinking as they rarely had before.
It does not appear in the English language, in fact, until as late as 1692, when an Oxford historian named Anthony Wood used it. He could not, as the saying goes, “look something up.” Indeed the very phrase-when it is used in the sense of “searching for something in a dictionary or encyclopedia or other book of reference”-simply did not exist.
“Shakespeare was not even able to perform a function that we consider today as perfectly normal and ordinary a function as reading itself. The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary If the definer contrives to follow all these rules, stirs into the mix an ever-pressing need for concision and elegance-and if he or she is true to the task, a proper definition will probably result.” And all the words in the definition must be found elsewhere in the dictionary-a reader must never happen upon a word in the dictionary that he or she cannot discover elsewhere in it. If there is a range of meanings of any one word- cow having a broad range of meanings, cower having essentially only one-then they must be stated. The definition must say what something is, and not what it is not. There must be no words in the definition that are more complicated or less likely to be known that the word being defined. There are rules-a word (to take a noun as an example) must first be defined according to the class of things to which it belongs (mammal, quadruped), and then differentiated from other members of that class (bovine, female). “Defining words properly is a fine and peculiar craft.
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