Since its inception in 2018, LEMDO has gratefully depended upon the Lexicons of Early Modern English project (LEME). Created by the late Professor Emeritus Ian Lancashire between 1992 and 2024, LEME offers metadata for 1473 lexicons from 1475 to 1755, and downloadable transcriptions of 314 of those lexicons. LEMDO’s original encoding practices depended on the LEME lexicon number and number of the entry in the lexicon; our processing turned the citation into a direct link to the entry on LEME’s website. In 2024, the transcribed lexicons were archived in the University of Toronto’s TSpace at https://hdl.handle.net/1807/99021, and the functionalities of the LEME website on which we relied were retired. This page has been entirely rewritten to account for the archiving of LEME.

The Oxford English Dictionary is a tremendously rich and continuously improving resource; it remains your primary resource for glossing words. However, the OED has gaps and limitations. You will also want to consult early modern lexicons, in particular the 300 dictionaries in Part One of the LEME Corpus (1475–1625).¹ You will find many usages and definitions that predate the first occurrences listed in the OED. LEMDO strongly encourages editors to use LEME alongside the OED, and to cite preferentially from LEME as often as possible. These lexicons provide us with information about whether or not a word was considered a hard word or a specialized term of art.

As Ian Lancashire has taught us, early modern lexicons had different objectives than modern historical dictionaries. Some lexicons offered lists of hard words—words that were new, obsolete, or highly specialized, such as the Verba Osoleta et Alia. Others explained terms of art in fields such as alchemy, medicine, and theory. Generally speaking, hard words and terms of art are the head words in such dictionaries. The definitions and explanations call upon colloquial terms; whether the word you are glossing appears in the head word or the definition can tell you a lot about how common or comprehensible an early modern word might have been to playgoers. Still others were bilingual or multilingual lexicons, some designed to provide translations of words needed by travellers and others to provide translations of hard words and terms of art. You will want to read the section entitled Scope in the Introduction to LEME and ensure that you understand the difference between hard word lexicons, translating dictionaries, and terms of art lexicons.

We add individual dictionaries in LEME to our bibliography as editors cite them. You can help the LEMDO Team by providing the LEME lexicon ID (the first column in https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/lexiconsByDate/.

For your parenthetical citation, you may cite the signature number of the page on which your quoted material appears, or you may cite by headword if the headwords are listed alphabetically and are therefore findable by your reader.

Let’s say that you are commenting on an instance of the word apricock and want to make a lexical note about the variant forms of the word in early modern English:

Do not gesture towards LEME generally as support for an argumentative claim. For example, you cannot claim that “ The Lexicons of Early Modern English makes a clear distinction between love and lust”. Which dictionaries in LEME? What passages from those dictionaries? What are the dates of those dictionaries? LEME is a tool to help you find lexicons, but it’s the lexicons themselves that provide support for your claims, and you need to be precise in quoting from and analyzing passages from those lexicons.