The Oxford companion to the English language

1216 Pages·1992·33.31 MB·English

EDITED BY
TDM McARTHUR
This thousand-page cornucopia brings readers information on virtually every
aspect of the English language:
• Comprehensive—Over 3,500 entries covering writing and speech, linguis
tics, rhetoric, literary terms, and a thousand related topics such as bilingual
education, child language acquisition, sign language, and psycholinguistics
• Informative—Provides bibliographies for the larger entries, generous cross-
referencing, etymologies for headwords, a chronology of English from Roman
times to 1990, and an index of people who appear in entries or bibliographies
• Colorful—Includes vivid biographies of figures who have influenced the
shape or study of English, from Shakespeare and Joyce, to Noam Chomsky and
Noah Webster, as well as many delightful asides that make browsing a joy
Printed in the U.S.A.
The
Oxford Companion
to the
English Language

The
Oxford Companion
to the
English Language
Editor
TOM McARTHUR
Managing Editor
FERI McARTHUR
Oxford New York
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1992
Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0x2 6DP
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Melbourne Auckland Madrid
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press, New York
© Tom Me Arthur 1992
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without
the prior permission of Oxford University Press
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way
of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
ISBN 0-19-214183-X
Typeset by Latimer Trend Ltd., Plymouth
Printed in the United States of America
on acid free paper
Contents
Preface vii
Contributors and Consultants xi
The Organization of the Companion xvii
Abbreviations XXV
Phonetic Symbols xxvi
World Map xxviii
Companion to the English Language i
Index of Persons 1149
To the staff of Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge
Preface
TOWARDS the end of lunch one day in Oxford, in the summer of 1986,
David Attwooll asked me if I would consider editing a Companion to the
English Language. The idea took some moments to sink in, and when it did
was both appealing and appalling. It appealed because the time was right
for such a book: English had become so internationally significant and was
the object of so much research that an overview was badly needed. It appalled
because trying to produce an A to Z survey of the language over all its
centuries, as used by all manner of folk, in all kinds of places, for all sorts of
purposes, made going to sea in a sieve look quite safe.
I thought: one editor, many contributors—there would be chaos in the
making of this book. Everybody would have an opinion on everything,
endlessly, yet I would have to close the circle somewhere and let the results
be printed. Purists would want one thing, permissivists another, and neither
would compromise. Pedants would want every / dotted and t crossed, with
quibbles till Kingdom come, while Plain English campaigners would want a
prose style with only active sentences each fifteen words long. Liberals would
want to be fair to everyone, balancing every viewpoint and counter-
viewpoint, until from the point of view of conservatives everything cancelled
out everything else. Some writers would want maximum concision, using
plenty of abbreviations and symbols; others would want optimum flow and
as few abbreviations and symbols as possible. And all the while I would have
to step with care among land-mines labelled 'class' and 'colonialism', 'colour'
and 'creed', 'ethnicity' and 'foreignness', 'feminism' and 'gender', 'nation-
ality' and 'nativeness', 'prejudice', 'special pleading', and 'taste'.
Finally, the day after publication, sins of omission and commission would
be mercilessly listed by reviewers and readers: 'There is no entry on anti-
metabole!'; 'They've put in Boontling but left out Bungo Talk!'; 'There is, I
am sorry to report, a dangling participle in the entry on illiteracy.'
After I agreed to put my head in the lion's mouth, it took a year to think
about the issues and talk to people whose help and support I would need.
At one point, a friend observed: 'It's like being asked to write the Bible.'
There was truth in that. Sacred threads run through the world of reference
books, and one of them bears the colours of Oxford. There were strong views
(both inside and outside the Press) about what a companion to English
should be and what an Oxford companion should not be: not a gazetteer of
the international language (warts and all), not a guide to style and usage
(there were enough of those), not a grammar book in disguise or a hidden
history or a companion to literature by other means, not a compendium on
linguistics or a coffee-table book full of pictures and maps, and certainly not
a dictionary of allusions, quotations, origins, phrases, and fables. When the
negatives were all added up, the project became impossible—unless one could
viii PREFACE
somehow co-opt features from all such books into a pattern that served new
ends and was in the end much more than the sum of its parts.
Six years have passed. In that time, there have been a first and second
plan, a first, second, and third master list of entries, a set of guidelines, a
growing list of writers and advisers, and a build-up of entries written, edited,
amended, reviewed, often rewritten and re-edited, sometimes re-reviewed,
sometimes re-rewritten and then re-re-rewritten, and finally all dropped into
place by means of a versatile and fascinating technology. Without its IBM
hardware and Nota Bene software, the project would, I suspect, have taken
twice as long and may well never have been finished at all. Throughout the
work, I have adhered to the original Oxford plan, which was that some
60 per cent of the entries should be the work of contributors, and the rest
my own.
Sometimes it was easy; sometimes it was hard. Alongside the triumphs
and trials of the work there have been tribulations of illness and death.
Martyn Wakelin died in 1988, just as he was about to start on the dialects of
England; Peter Strevens died in 1989, half-way through his entries on lan-
guage teaching; and John Platt died in 1990 while his contributions on
English in East and South-East Asia were being edited. These were heartfelt
losses.
At home, Feri McArthur, Managing Editor, and my wife of nearly 30
years, fell victim in 1989 to acute myeloid leukaemia, but, despite spells in
hospital and the ongoing threat, she built up and sustained our worldwide
network of contributors and consultants. Then, as the work entered its
closing phase, our 20-year-old son (in defiance of all the laws of medical
probability) fell ill with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. The same hospital
and the same unit in that hospital cared for him as had cared for Feri, and
coaxed him safely out of danger during the long slow months when the
Companion was being copy-edited and prepared for press.
I am indebted, beyond words in any language, to the staff of the Haem-
atological Unit and Ward Cio of Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge: espe-
cially to Consultants Robert Marcus and Trevor Baglin, Sister Alison Weth-
erall, Staff Nurse Nicki de Zeeuw, and Housekeeper Pat McVeigh. I am also
deeply appreciative of the efficient and sympathetic help that I myself received
at Addenbrookes when, in mid-1991, half-way through the copy-editing, I
had an experience of angina pectoris. Because this remarkable hospital
became for a time home from home for the McArthur clan, we decided to
dedicate the Companion to the entire staff.
We are grateful to all our companions and helpers on the way, for the
work they have done, the patience they have shown, and especially the
heart-warming personal support of so many. We would like, in particular,
to thank our ten Associate Editors for involvement well beyond the call of
academic duty. I would also like to record my admiration for and special
thanks to George Tulloch, copy-editor extraordinary.
The Companion has been a great affair, with a scale and momentum that
still excite and surprise me. Yet, in the course of the work, I have from time