dirty words in dictionaries: the Wessely dictionary

[Damien Hall]

The Wessely dictionary seems to have an interesting history, as far as I can
work out from the BorrowDirect catalogue to which I have access (which searches
the libraries of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton and
Yale).

A slightly more complete answer to the dating question is probably to be had
from the Yale catalogue entry:

AUTHOR: Wessely, Joseph Eduard, 1826-1895
TITLE: Handy dictionary of the Latin and English languages, with an appendix of
Latin geographical, historical and mythological proper names.
IMPRINT: Philadelphia : D. McKay, [188-?]

But NB the author:  not Ignaz Emanuel Wessely here, but Joseph Eduard, born
fifteen years earlier.

The plot thickens.  I'll end the main part of this message here since, for a
list about English, the rest of it is decidedly OT.  What follows my signature
is the details of other editions of what is possibly the same dictionary,
included only in case someone is interested in getting the possible later
editions and seeing whether 'cunt' has been removed or not.

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania

=================================

There also appears to have been at least one twentieth-century edition of the
same dictionary:

AUTHOR:
TITLE: Handy dictionary of the Latin and English languages, with an appendix of
Latin, geographical, historical, and mythological proper names.
IMPRINT: Philadelphia, David McKay Company, 1943.

(no author cited;  this one is at Brown and Cornell).

Finally, this one may just share a title with the Wessely dictionary, though it
appears to have been published by the same house:

AUTHOR: Woodhouse, S. C. (Sidney Chawner), b. 1871
TITLE: Handy dictionary of the Latin and English languages / by S.C. Woodhouse.

IMPRINT: New York : D. McKay, 1962.

(at Brown and Princeton)