Welcome to the Emily Dickinson Lexicon Website

[Note: Drafts of the Dickinson lexicon files A - Z are available for use under the EDLexicon tab. The EDL website allows users to access existing material while we proof-read and revise the data. Drafts of all of the Webster 1844 dictionary files are available under the Webster tab. A draft of Webster's 1844 Introduction is available under the Resources tab. We will continue to upgrade the Webster dictionary files, using them to edit entries in the Emily Dickinson Lexicon. We invite visitors and registered users to provide feedback at cynthia_hallen@byu.edu.]

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) wrote approximately 1,789 lyric poems in nineteenth-century American English. The Emily Dickinson Lexicon (EDL) is a comprehensive dictionary of over 9,275 words and variants found in the collected poems. Visitors to the website may search the lexicon to view alphabetical entries that consist of a headword with its inflected forms, part of speech, etymology, webplay, and definitions. Users who register by reading the site license and sign-in on the website have further access to citation examples and poem numbers from the Johnson and Franklin editions of Dickinson’s poems. There is no charge for registration because the website is not for profit.

Dickinson composed most of the verse in her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts, during the noon of New England’s philological renaissance. Her “loved Philology” (J1651/Fr1715) presents a close-knit diction that she crafted with allusions, ambiguity, antithesis, circumlocution, definitions, figures, idioms, kennings, metaphors, polysemy, puns, symbols, and synonymy. Her handiwork includes lexical correspondences to Noah Webster's 1844 American Dictionary of the English Language, for which we have coined the term webplay.

We gratefully acknowledge those who have collaborated to create this lexicon as a reference tool for readers, writers, students, scholars, critics, poets, corpus linguists, and translators. One of the primary aims of the lexicon is to facilitate the translation of Emily Dickinson’s collected poems into as many languages as possible. We invite registered users to contribute revisions, corrections, and additions as they examine headwords and definitions in the EDL website database.

All materials, including computer code, contained on this website are protected by United States and International copyright and other applicable laws: © 2007–2009 Brigham Young University.