Glossary
Alston: entry number in R. C. Alston's A Bibliography of the English Language to 1800 (1965-)
analyzed lexicon: see lexicon
bilingual lexicon: see lexicon
catchword: "The first word of the following page inserted at the right-hand lower corner of each page of a book, below the last line" (OED). LEME transcriptions do not record catchwords.
collocation: two or more words or phrases that appear repeatedly together, before or after one another, within a small passage
colophon: "The inscription or device, sometimes pictorial or emblematic, formerly placed at the end of a book or manuscript, and containing the title, the scribe's or printer's name, date and place of printing, etc." (OED)
concordance: an index of different words from a text, with a reference citation about their location in that text, and sometimes a brief context or quotation
context: the text within which a cited word or phrase appears
character-set: the letters, numbers, and special characters in LEME are encoded in UTF-8 (Unicode)
definition, logical: an explanation of a thing, normally specifying its species and essential features so as to differentiate it from other things
definition, lexical: an explanation of a word's meaning or sense, normally specifying enough information to differentiate it from other words
display: the representation of a lexical text
dittography: "the unintentional repetition of a letter or word, or series of letters or words, by a copyist" (OED)
EMEDD: Early Modern English Dictionaries database
emendation: an editorial correction of an error usually made by the compositor or scribe. LEME retains the error within a tag in the underlying encoded text
encoding: see source encoding
encyclopedic-lexical: see lexical encyclopedia
entity reference: a conventional notation in SGML and XML used to represent a special character that may not be found on a standard keyboard
errata: a list of corrections to errors in a printed text
error: editorial emendation , normally of a printer's mistake (not a correction of fact or interpretation)
expansion: the writing out of a sequence of characters that have been abbreviated or contracted
explanation: the post-headword or post-lemmatic part of word-entry that gives a definition, a synonym, a corresponding term in another language, or some other comment
expression: a word, phrase, or sentence that is either cited as such or that appears in a language that differs from its context
form: the principal initial term in a word-entry, and what the post-lemmatic segment explains. The editorially-made modern headword is created from the form. See also sub-form
full word entry: see word entry, full
global search: see search, global
hanging word: a word at the end of a line that is suspended at the end of the previous or following line
hard word: a word borrowed from another language, a neologism or invented word, or a term of art that has yet to be absorbed into the mother tongue
headword: the term by which a word-entry is sorted in an alphabetical or topical lexicon
headword, modernized: an editorial headword, encoded anywhere in a word-entry, that puts an inflected, old-spelling, or variant word-form into a modern-spelling form that is conventionally employed for headwords in modern dictionaries. This is called lemmatization. Nouns are represented by the nominative singular inflection, and verbs by the infinitive form.
HELP: menu on Welcome Page. This allows a reader to read the editorial introduction, the help section, and a description of those who bring out LEME, and to submit comments and questions.
imprint: the printer and the publisher of a book
incipit: the first line of a manuscript
LEME WORD LIST: item under WORD LIST menu. This screen allows a reader to search or browse from a complete list of all expressions (of whatever language and in whatever position) from all lexical works in the LEME database.
lemmatized headword: see headword, modernized
lexical encyclopedia: a lexical text whose word-entries describe things in the world more than explain the words that denote them
LEXICONS: menu on Welcome Page. This allows a reader to choose five ways of browsing an index of the lexical works in the Early Modern period, by author, title, date, subject, and genre.
lexicon: a text with lexical content, whether organized formally into word-entries or distributed through running text as definitions or explanations of words or things
lexicon genre: the type of lexical work, one of multilingual dictionary, glossary, or vocabulary, English dictionary or glossary, grammar, hard-word and term-of-art dictionary or glossary, indexes of proper and place names, spelling texts, and treatises (without an explicit lexical structure)
lexicon subject: the content of a lexical work, such as herbs, the sea, the law, medicine, and so on
lexicon, analyzed: a lexical text that has had its headwords editorially-lemmatized and that has been segmented by headword, explanation, sub-headwords, sub-explanations, and cross-references. This analysis enables restriction of searches of analyzed lexical works by the lemmatized spelling of their headwords, and by the position of the words to be retrieved
lexicon, bilingual: a lexical text that has parallel English and foreign-language texts or that gives word-entries that translate between English and another language
lexicon, displayable: a lexical text whose transcription can be viewed, page by page, word-entry by word-entry, within LEME. Only analyzed lexicons can be displayed.
lexicon, polyglot: a lexical text that has parallel English and two or more foreign-language texts or that gives word-entries that translate between English and two or more other languages
lexicon, searchable: any lexical text in LEME may be searched, whether analyzed or not
lexicon, unanalyzed: a lexical work that may be searched within LEME but that cannot be searched with restrictions or be displayed, page by page, entry by entry see ADVANCED LEXICON SEARCH see QUICK LEXICON SEARCH
ligature: joined letters, such as æ
MODERN HEADWORDS SEARCH: item under SEARCH menu. This screen enables a reader to select from one of two lists of editorially-modernized headwords from word-entries in historical lexicons, one list of words in alphabetical sequence, and another list of words by part of speech
modern headword: see headword, modernized
normalized headword: see headword, modernized
NOTEPAD: menu on Welcome Page. This screen enables a reader to print or to email word-entries saved to the notepad.
notes: editorial notes on word-forms or word-entries occur from time to time in LEME transcriptions and may be viewed from the word-entry display
page text: parts of a lexical text that are not encoded as word-entries, such as an introduction
part of speech: the MODERN HEADWORDS SEARCH allows two kinds of searches and displays, alphabetically and by part of speech (abbreviation, adjective, adverb, conjunction, determiner or article, exclamation or interjection, name, noun, number, prefix, preposition, pronoun, relative, suffix, and verb
pattern: a search that consists of one or more letters or numbers, and one or more special pattern-matching characters. In computer science, this is termed a regular expression. Six special characters -- ? + * ( | ) -- are available. The question mark ? stands for a possible single letter: for example, the search pattern ham?let retrieves instances of hamlet, hamelet, hammlet, etc. The plus sign + stands for a required letter: for example, the search pattern mo+e retrieves instances of mode, mone, moue, etc. The asterisk stands for zero or more letters: for example, the search pattern mu*er retrieves instances of murther, murder, mummer, etc. The remaining three special characters enclose a character class that stands for any one of three specified characters, separated from one another by a rule. For example, the search pattern m(a|i)stere retrieves instances of mastere or mistere but not mystere, etc. Patterns can be combined. For example, the search pattern t(a|e|i|o|u)ss* retrieves instances of tuss, tossed, tassel, etc.
PERIOD WORD-LIST: item under WORD LIST menu. This screen allows a reader to search or browse from a complete list of all expressions (of whatever language and in whatever position) from all works in the database of more than 10,000 texts in the EEBO/TCP corpus.
pointing: punctuation marks
polyglot lexicon: see lexicon
post-lemmatic segment: the explanatory part of a word-entry
proximity search: see search, proximity
QUICK LEXICON SEARCH: item under SEARCH menu. This screen allows a reader to search for words that can be restricted only by date.
reset: a button that resets a search to default conditions
restricted search: see search, restricted
results: see search results
running title: a short title or heading found at the top of a page that does not divide the text into different sections. LEME transcriptions do not record running titles.
Schäfer: entry number in Jürgen Schäfer's Early Modern English Lexicography (1989)
SEARCH: menu on Welcome Page see ADVANCED LEXICON SEARCH see MODERN HEADWORDS SEARCH see QUICK LEXICON SEARCH
search term: a word, phrase, sequence of characters, or pattern typed into a LEME search field for retrieval
search results: the tabular list of word-entries that are returned by a search
search, Boolean: an advanced LEME search that retrieves word-entries according to whether all search terms are found in them (using the operator and), at least one search term is found in them (the operator or), or one or more search terms is excluded from them (the operator not)
search, character: a search for a sequence of characters that may be part of a word
search, global: a search through all lexical texts in LEME
search, keyword: a search for a word or term
search, proximity: a search for two or more keywords, sequences of characters, or patterns that occur near, or not near, one another within a certain context (a specified number of words)
search, quick: a LEME keyword search that may have only one restriction, a date or a range
search, restricted: a search for a keyword, a sequences of character, or a pattern that occurs in word-entries which satisfy one or more the following criteria -- date, language, author, title, genre, subject, STC/Wing catalogue number, location in the word-entry, and size of context
search, word: see search, keyword
signature: "A letter or figure, a set or combination of letters or figures, etc., placed by the printer at the foot of the first page (and frequently on one or more of the succeeding pages) of every sheet in a book, for the purpose of showing the order in which these are to be placed or bound" (OED). . LEME transcriptions encode but do not transcribe signatures.
soft hyphen: an entity reference that indicates a break in a word over a line-break (distinguished from a hard hyphen, which indicates a compounding)
source encoding: XML-like tags in LEME transcriptions mark the parts of word-entries, and other features of texts, so as to facilitate their searching and retrieval
special characters: see entity reference
spelling list: a lexical text that lists English words either for inventorying the vocabulary of a language or for standardizing orthography
sub-form: the principal initial term in a sub-entry, usually a phrasal construction that includes the form, or an inflection of the form
term of art: an Early Modern English expression for a word that belongs to a professional or occupational register and may not be widely known to speakers at large
text type: printed book or manuscript
transcription source: the copy of the edition, or the manuscript, used as the basis for a LEME transcription of a lexicon text
treatise: a lexical genre of works that explain or define or comment on words or things in running prose or marginal notes rather than in explicitly structured word-entries
unanalyzed lexicon: see lexicon
vocabulary: a collection of words or word-entries intended to satisfy a specific purpose, such as to represent the language of a given subject or topic
word browse: to view and range through a word list
word of the day: a LEME word-entry selected at random and appearing on the Welcome Page each time it is opened
word search: see search
word entry: a headword (lemma) or word-form, accompanied by an explanation (a definition, a synonym, a corresponding term in another language)
word entry, full: unanalyzed word entry
word entry record: a pop-up window that appears when a reader clicks on one of the LEME search results that result from a search. The word entry record holds the full text of a retrieved word-entry and enables a reader to store it in the NOTEPAD, view other word-entries with the same modern headword, obtain the word-entry's permanent URL, call up the lexicon's bibliographic record, see the underlying source encoding of the word-entry (including its original lineation), and browse the full text (if displayable)
word-group: a sequence of word-entries found under an identifying heading, such as a letter of the alphabet or a topic name
WORD LIST: menu on Welcome Page. This allows a reader to call up the LEME and Period Word Lists.
