A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language

by Walter W. Skeat

This 1901 volume of A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language completely updates the classic reference work first published in 1882. Skeat provides a staggering number of words, including those most frequently used in everyday speech and those most prominent in literature. They appear along with their definitions, their language of origin, their roots, and their derivatives. Those who are fascinated with the English language will find much to explore here and many overlooked but interesting tidbits and treasures of an ever-evolving language. Walter W. Skeat was a scholar of Old English, mathematics, English place names, and Anglo-Saxon. He founded the English Dialect Society in 1873 and was a professor at Cambridge University. Skeat edited many classic works, including Lancelot of the Laik, Piers Plowman, The Bruce, Lives of Saints, and a seven-volume edition of Chaucer.

Genres: Reference, Nonfiction, Language, Linguistics

684 pages, Hardcover

Published April 15, 2005

About the author

Walter William Skeat, English philologist, educated at King's College School (Wimbledon), Highgate School, and Christ's College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in July 1860. The noted palaeographer T. C. Skeat was his grandson.

In 1878 he was elected Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge. He completed Mitchell Kemble's edition of the Anglo-Saxon Gospels, and did much other work both in Anglo-Saxon and in Gothic, but is perhaps most generally known for his labours in Middle English, and for his standard editions of Chaucer and Langland's Piers Plowman.

As he himself generously declared, he was at first mainly guided in the study of Chaucer by Henry Bradshaw, with whom he was to have participated in the edition of Chaucer planned in 1870 by the University of Oxford, having declined in Bradshaw's favour an offer of the editorship made to himself. Bradshaw's perseverance was not equal to his genius, and the scheme came to nothing for the time, but was eventually resumed and carried into effect by Skeat in an edition of six volumes (1894), a supplementary volume of Chaucerian Pieces being published in 1897. He also issued an edition of Chaucer in one volume for general readers, and a separate edition of his Treatise on the Astrolabe, with a learned commentary.

His edition of Piers Plowman in three parallel texts was published in 1886; and, besides the Treatise on the Astrolabe, he edited numerous books for the Early English Text Society, including the Bruce of John Barbour, Pierce the Ploughman's Crede, the romances of Havelok the Dane and William of Palerne, and Ælfric's Lives of the Saints (4 vols.). For the Scottish Text Society he edited The Kingis Quair, usually ascribed to James I of Scotland, and he published an edition (2 vols., 1871) of Chatterton, with an investigation of the sources of the obsolete words employed by him.

He is buried at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge.

Reviews

[Dan]

Acquired Oct 31, 1997
The Word, Montreal, Quebec

[Bernie4444 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very convoluted entries

Most negative reviews, found for “Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language” by Walter W. Skeat, are due to poor cop pie in circulation. My review is of a professional paperback version

Still, you will need to take the time to read the second abbreviation before even thinking of using this dictionary. When you start to read the dictionary, you will find that it is all abbreviations. Each entry “usually” has a word or two about the definition then goes into a series of abbreviations about its origins.

I would not keep this book except because it has a few rare gems not found in other references.