Typography in sixteenth-century English dictionaries

The chapter constitutes the first detailed study of how early lexicographers and printers exploited typography to present the description of the meaning of words and their morphological analyses to their readers. It provides an outline of the bi- and multilingual English dictionaries printed between 1499 and 1604 and illustrates the changes in the page layout (e.g. columns, indentation, frame structure), the introduction and use of different fonts and type sizes (e.g. black letter, italic type, roman type), capitalization, letter-spacing, and symbols (the pilcrow, the pointing hand, the ivy leaf, the asterism, etc.). Three typographical phases are distinguished.