John Jamieson, Franz Passow, and the Double Invention of Lexicography on Historical Principles

Abstract

This article argues that the historical principles which guide most major scholarly dictionaries today were invented independently by two nineteenth-century scholars, John Jamieson of Edinburgh in 1802 and Franz Passow of Danzig in 1812. It suggests how both Jamieson and Passow may have based their lexicographical innovations on contemporary developments in (i) literary and cultural history and (ii) geology, palaeontology, and biology, and proposes that this accounts both for the near-simultaneity of their innovations and for their remarkably modest attitudes towards them.

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