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Article: Chasing the sun: dictionary makes and the dictionaries they made.
- Article from:
- Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada
- Article date:
- September 22, 1998
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Bibliographical Society of Canada. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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New York: Henry Holt, 1996. xviii, 510 pp.; $30,000 U.S. (cloth) ISBN 0-8050-3466-8.
Chasing the Sun is an account of some dictionaries and dictionary makers. Jonathan Green is himself a leading lexicographer and historian of lexicography, the author of dictionaries of slang and jargon, a slang thesaurus, a dictionary of new words, The Cynic's Lexicon, Encyclopedia of Censorship, A-Z of Nuclear Jargon, and Slang Down the Ages. Chasing the Sun is a chronological tour of lexicography from cuneiform word lists on clay tablets 4,500 years ago in Mesopotamia to today's CD-ROMS and politicially correct definitions of words.
Lexicography may have changed, but ...