AN

ANALYTICAL DICTIONARY

OF THE

ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

IT is by no means the province of the writer of a Dictionary to distinguish between what is true and what is fabulous in the history of the world. Whether Language be the necessary consequence of society, and owe its origin and its improvement to the same principle of the human heart which collects the habitations of men; or whether a primitive tongue were communicated to the first inhabitants of the globe by an all-powerful Being, who called them into existence, it is not our present business to enquire. The different thoughts of the mind are now, whatever may have been the cause, expressed by distinctive sounds of the human voice; and these sounds are recalled to the memory, along with their associated thoughts, by means of the varied combinations of certain visible characters, each of which brings to our recollection merely an elementary sound. Every such combination is a word. To discover the thought that each of these words expresses, in the written language of this country, is the object of the present work. For this purpose, however, some mode of arrangement is requisite. Every arrangement must, in some degree, be founded on hypothesis :-but it should be kept in mind, that, whatever we may here adopt will be, solely with the view of facilitating our explanations ;-not to support any particular system or fanciful speculation. Whether the thread that shall connect the tale be real or imaginary, we are anxious that the features of the description shall be true to nature.

The feelings of the mind are sufficiently similar, among the different individuals of mankind, to constitute a general reciprocity of sentiment. With like organs of sensation, we acquire corresponding ideas; and we are capable of communicating these ideas, by means of the faculty of speech. The howl of the savage at the approach of danger, or his cry of joy at the sight of his prey,-reiterated or varied with the return or the change of objects,-was. probably, the

VOL. L.

origin of the Language of the early ages of the human race.

The subdivision of

a sound, into the elements which we now denominate letters, would have been then unknown, and must have formed a second, but distant, epoch in the improvements of society.

The names of objects, thus acquired and understood, would, with the accompaniments of tone and gesture, be sufficient in ordinary cases to signify the desires or aversions of the speaker. His words would indeed be few, but they would be as numerous as his ideas, or the particulars of his knowledge, and it might not then have been necessary for him to speak, by the direction of others, of what he could not comprehend. Even in expressing the common occurrences of life, he must have found sufficient difficulty, without entering into the regions of imagination. The names, then, of those things with which the senses are conversant would, seemingly, constitute the whole of the Vocabulary of the first age of the world; and it will be seen, in the progress of this work, what are the number and nature of those classes of words which succeeding generations have added to the collection.

Man feels himself as a Being distinct from the other parts of the Universe. The images of things flit before him like the reflexions of a mirror; and, by an inexplicable association, those images are retained, or recalled, by what we term Memory, long after the things themselves have, in our judgment, changed their form, or ceased to be. Man has, therefore, a World within himself, the counterpart of that which he conceives to exist around him; and, hence, he is sometimes denominated the MICROCOSM, a word derived from the Greek, signifying, a little world.

The names of objects may be considered as conventional sounds, by which one Man endeavours to give information to another of the images that pass through his mind. Those things with which he is more immediately connected must occur more frequently than others. Pleasure and pain, apparently the result of the impressions of outward objects, must lead him more generally to attend to the organs of his body, by which those impressions are received; and, therefore, we shall not be accused of adopting an unnatural arrangement, if we begin our definitions with an account of the human race.

The word MAN, with a slightly varied orthography, or pronunciation, is common to all the Gothic dialects. It is the general name of the species, and, if unaccompanied with any mark of sexual distinction, and confined to an individual, it signifies that which is held pre-eminent-the male-the same as in many other animals :-The Horse, for instance, is the name of the species, including both sexes; but the same word Horse signifies also the male, while another word, Mare, is appropriated to the female. In the Anglo-Saxon, or old English, WIFE

was the general denomination of the human female. It was applied even to a Maiden. WOMAN is now used (which was formerly Wifman) and the word Wife is confined, by modern usage, to denote a married Woman. The word Man has undergone an opposite change. It once signified a married Man, as it still does in Scotland, and in some of the dialects of Germany, where Man and Wife are correlative. In modern English, however, it is solely applicable to the species in general, or to the male in particular.

Every fundamental word may originate an extensive number of compounds Every object, or thing, may have various qualities, or modes of operation: Thus, from MAN, we have MANFUL, MANFULLY, MANFULNESS, MANLY or MANLIKE, MANLINESS, and MANHOOD. They express the various qualities of Man as he ought to be; and they may be varied, or extended, at the pleasure of the writer. We have also its compounds with words in use, as well as with terminations : We have MANEATER, MANHAter, Mankind, (the kind or race of man) MANKILLER, or MANSLAYER, and MANSLAUGHTER. MANNIKEN, the diminutive, is a little Man. The word MONKEY is supposed to be from the same source;-it is the name of an animal that, in some degree, resembles, but is less than Man. The verb To MAN is used in a peculiar manner: a Ship of War is termed a MAN of WAR, and to Man is to fill her with Men. To UNMAN is to deprive one of the properties of Man. UNMANLY, or UNMANLIKE, is applied to designate conduct unworthy of a Man. WOMAN has the compounds WOMANHOOD, or WOMANHEAD, WOMANHATER, WOMANKIND, WOMANISH, and WOMANLY. Shakespear uses the verb TO WOMAN, in different senses, which are easily understood, in every case, from the other words with which the phrase is connected.

Such were the variations of the primitive words of the English tongue, previous to the introduction of foreign compounds with which it is now inundated. It was a spoken, long before it was a written, language; and those, who first attempted to mark, by characters, its fleeting sounds, were previously initiated into the literature of Greece and Rome. It is hence that our language contains numerous compounds, of which the component words are unknown to the mere English scholar. They express nothing better than could have been done by the language of our earlier ancestors; but here we find them, and we must write now, as those before us have written. There is this difference, however, between the compounds of words that are separately used, and those which belong to a stranger language, that, in the former, we may multiply the compounds at. pleasure, while, in the latter, we are limited to the usage of those who introduced them. What we here mention will become more obvious as we advance.

MALE and FEMALE are never used but to indicate the gender. They are merely He and She; and are applied to every animal as well as to Man. The

Latin Mas signifies Male. The French is Masle, where the s is silent. Our possessive, MASCULINE (Latin Masculinus) is of the Male kind, in opposition to FEMININE. MASCULINELY and MASCULINENESS are in the Dictionaries, but have seldom been used. The verb, TO EMASCULATE, is to deprive of any property peculiar to the Male; and hence EMASCULATION is the production of Effeminacy of mind, as well as the action of castration. EFFEMINACY is the once Masculine reduced to Womanhood. To EFFEMINATE is to render feminine or womanish; and EFFEMINATELY is in a womanish manner. These are never applied except to the mind. EFFEMINATION for Effeminacy is obsolete.

Among the Romans, HOMO was equivalent to our word Man, in its general sense, including both sexes. It was likewise occasionally applied to the male sex VIR is englished by the word Man, but it was limited to the Male of the species, and was, like their Mas and our Male, also applicable to animals. We have compounds from both these Latin words (Homo and Vir) expressing the same ideas that we might otherwise denote by combinations of the word Man; but limited, as foreign compounds always are, to a partial application :-Thus, HOMICIDE, from cædere, to kill, is a Mankiller, as also the name of the action, Manslaughter. HOMICIDAL is the adjective. HUMAN, is belonging to Man in general. HUMANE, the same word, varied in the orthography of modern times, is the being possessed of the feelings of commiseration, which are supposed to be peculiar to Man. INHUMAN is its opposite, and differs from BRUTAL in this only, that the cruelty of the disposition, or conduct, expressed by the word, is conceived to be inherent in the form of Man. When we apply the latter term we, in imagination, transform the Man into a Brute.HUMANITY is the general state of man compared with other Beings. It is also the state of being humane. HUMANITY is, therefore, used as an abstract term for both the adjectives. It is equivalent to human-ness as well as humaneSUPERHUMAN INHUMANITY is limited to the state of being Inhuman.

ness.

is simply above human. TO HUMANIZE is to render humane. HUMANLY, HUMANELY, and INHUMANLY, are the adverbs. The HUMANKIND is opposed to other races of Beings.

In ancient times the greater part of men were servants, or slaves, and our older writers have Man in this sense. It is still so used in the army, for we speak of a General and his Men. The word, however, is not here different from its ordinary acceptation: it is only uttered from the lips of the powerful, who, in saying our Men', reckon their vassals as property. During the feudal system, which still exists under legal forms, the petty landholder was considered as the vassal, or servant, of his Lord; and, for certain services, he held his lands as a