English

Noun

lexicographers

1. Plural of lexicographer

A lexicographer is a person devoted to the study of lexicography, especially an author of a dictionary.

Samuel Johnson, himself a lexicographer, defined a lexicographer as "a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words". However Jonathon Green, in Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made (1996) suggests that this was a piece of eighteenth century politeness, and that a clearer indication of Johnson's view is given a little later in the same text where he says "Though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he had not . . . studied the lexicons, yet he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman competently wise in his mother dialect only".

Notable lexicographers

• Adam Jack Aitken (Scottish)
• Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (Hebrew)
• Francis Bacon
• Katherine Barber
• Julian Barnes
• Henning Bergenholtz (Danish)
• Ambrose Bierce
• Thomas Blount
• Henry Bradley
• Peter Bowler
• Robert Burchfield
• Thomas Cooper
• William Craigie
• Vladimir Dal
• Tomás de Bhaldraithe
• Susie Dent
• Aurélio Buarque de Holanda Ferreira
• Henry Watson Fowler
• Isaac Kaufmann Funk
• Frederick James Furnivall
• Hesychius of Alexandria
• A. S. Hornby
• Antônio Houaiss
• Samuel Johnson
• Emmanuel Kriaras
• Władysław Kopaliński (Polish)
• Pierre Larousse
• María Moliner (Spanish)
• James Murray
• Sandro Nielsen (Danish)
• Niall Ó Dónaill
• Sergei Ozhegov
• Charles Talbut Onions
• Eric Partridge
• Josette Rey-Debove (French)
• Peter Mark Roget
• John Simpson
• J.R.R. Tolkien
• Magdi Wahba (Egyptian)
• John Walker
• Noah Webster
• Edmund Weiner
• Delfín Carbonell Basset (Spanish and English)
• G Venkatasubbaiah - Kannada
• Yousef Al-Bader (Kuwaiti)
• Sima Guang (Chinese)