Emily Dickinson Lexicon

Welcome to the Emily Dickinson Lexicon Website

[Note: Special thanks to EDL team member Dallin J. Bailey for his work on each and every one of Webster's etymologies! Thank you for your patience as we finish proof-reading the Dickinson lexicon files A - Z and the Webster 1844 dictionary files A - Z, available under the EDLexicon and Webster tabs. A draft of Webster's 1844 Introduction is available under the Resources tab. We are almost finished with our renovation of Webster's dictionary, and those files will expedite our editing of 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.