dirty words in dictionaries: the Wessely dictionary

[Wilson Gray]

On Jun 3, 2004, at 7:51 PM, Damien Hall wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Damien Hall <halldj at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      dirty words in dictionaries: the Wessely dictionary
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> 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).

Harvard has an edition very similar to the one above. The only
difference between the two is in the imprint: 1938.

-Wilson Gray

>
> 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)
>