William Perry's Synonymous, Etymological and Pronouncing English Dictionary (1805) : An attempt to synonymise Johnson's Dictionary

This chapter focuses on one of the very first synonym dictionaries to be published in England, that is William Perry’s The Synonymous, Etymological and Pronouncing English Dictionary (1805). Unlike Perry’s previous publications, The Synonymous, Etymological and Pronouncing English Dictionary was not re-printed after 1805 and Gove (1984: 7a) informs us that: “Chauncery Goodrich, Noah Webster’s son-in-law, referred to it in 1847 in his preface to the royal octavo volume of Webster as ‘entirely out of print’”. Noyes (1951: 968) defined The Synonymous, Etymological and Pronouncing English Dictionary as an “unusual hybrid”, not being in line with other similar works such as James Barclay’s Complete and Universal English Dictionary (1774) and Benjamin Dawson’s Philologia Anglicana (1799). However, it has been recently stated that William Perry, in explaining “words meanings simply by placing them in the context of synonyms, brings us methodically to Roget’s doorstep” (Hüllen 2004: 6). A contrastive analysis is presented and moving from the investigation of Perry’s dictionary I will comment on his innovative method and the criteria used to select and organise his dictionary entries in order to see whether he followed the original work closely, i.e. Johnson’s, or whether he used first-hand material as found in his The Royal Standard English Dictionary, as I have shown elsewhere (Sturiale 2008).