Today I worked at cleaning up, sorting, and putting things in boxes for a tag sale - and I found our battered and really old dictionary (as opposed to the 1881 one we also own - see the "language" category. It's an odd size - nearly square - battered, leather-bound, and missing a bunch of … Continue reading Dictionary 18??: Agate to Agrace

The other day (while looking for something else) I ran across our copy of A High-School Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1881 (abridged, it says, from a recent edition of Webster's dictionary).  And illustrated with 300 wood engravings. So, what words did the editors of this dictionary believe high-schoolers of the 1880s would … Continue reading Dictionary 1881: A to Abolish