On 13th August 1867 Sir William Craigie, the Scottish lexicographer, was born.
One thing you cannae say about Sir William Craigie is, âHe was a man of few words.â In fact, he was a man of many words; easily hundreds of thousands of words; more likely millions of words. In his day, Sir William was regarded as the foremost â nay, the most eminent â lexicographer, but he was also described as a language and literature scholar, and a philologist.
Isnât it funny that us Scots started some of the most famous English establishments, like William Paterson who gave them The Bank of England, it took a Scotsman from Dundee to put the English language into a decent semblance of order, after he was engaged to work on what was then called the âNew English Dictionaryâ and which is now commonly referred to as the âOxford Dictionaryâ or the âOxford English Dictionaryâ. He was editor of the dictionary for over 30 years.
He was also keen to promote the Scots language and pioneered a Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue. Craigie also worked on an Oxford edition of Hans Christian Andersen tales.Not content with sorting out the Scots and English words, Craigie went to the United States to work on the âDictionary of American Englishâ, Cragie also lectured on lexicography at the University of Chicago, where he taught many 20th Century American lexicographers of note.
With all this going on his pet project the Scots dictionary in was put on the back burner until 1921, when he began to make significant inroads towards producing âA Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue; From the Twelfth Century to the End of the Seventeenthâ. Despite continued research into the Scots language, from a first publication in 1931 up until the end of his life, Craigie never managed to complete that work, however, the project he pioneered has been completed. Since 2004, thanks to the charitable organization, Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd., twelve volumes are available, free to search, via the Internet at the bottom of this post.
Cragieâs brainchild is now known as âDOSTâ and covers the language from the era of âpre-literaryâ Scots, when there was a very meagre, extant literary output (literally nothing more than Barbourâs âBrusâ and the âLegends of the Saintsâ), through that of âearlyâ Scots (1375 to 1450), to âmiddleâ Scots (up to 1700). The dictionary was intended to present the entire Older Scottish vocabulary as it was preserved in literary, documentary and other records.
Sir William Alexander Craigie died at the age of ninety years and one month, in Watlington, Oxfordshire, on the 2nd of September, 1957.
http://www.scotsdictionaries.org.uk/