Emily Dickinson Lexicon

Nature of the Emily Dickinson Lexicon Project

The Emily Dickinson Lexicon is a dictionary of alphabetized headword entries for all of the words in Emily Dickinson’s collected poems (Johnson 1955 and Franklin 1998 editions). The scope of the Dickinson lexicon is comprehensive. A team of lexicographers and reviewers has examined almost 100,000 individual word occurrences to create approximately 9,275 headword entries. The EDL includes proper nouns, person names, and place names that are not usually listed in general dictionaries of the English language. Because high-frequency function words such as a, of, and the are important for Dickinson studies, the EDL includes basic definitions for 168 words that were omitted from Rosenbaum's concordance (xi) with their 38,235 occurrences. Words from Dickinson’s collected letters are not included in the EDL at this time.

Visitors and users can view the EDL by clicking on the lexicon tab in the top frame of the website. To access a specific entry, type a Dickinson word in the basic white Search box provided in the upper righthand corner of the layout. For advanced search options, click on the phrase "Advanced Search." To see multiple alphabetical entries, click on a letter of the alphabet or on a page number as serialized below the running headers for each EDL page.

Each EDL entry contains 1) a headword with any inflected forms, 2) the headword’s part of speech, 3) a basic etymology, 4) a list of webplay word collocations from Webster, 5) the definitions of the headword, 6) citation examples by poem number, and 7) a reference list:

1. Headwords are derived from the alphabetical listing in Rosenbaum’s concordance. The headwords appear in lower-case bold letters, as in the word adore (-d, -ing, -s) in the entry above. Inflected forms such as the past tense morpheme (-d or -ed), the present participle (-ing), and the third person present tense (-s) appear in parentheses after the headword if Dickinson used them in her poems.

2. Traditional parts of speech appear as abbreviations immediately after the headword, such as the form ‘v.’ for ‘verb’ in the entry for adore above. The part of speech expresses the grammatical function or lexical category of headwords. The word answer can be either a noun or a verb in Dickinson’s poems, so these appear as separate headwords in the EDL. Each derivational form of a word is treated as a separate entry, as in assemble the verb and assembly the noun.

3. The etymologies in square brackets have two functions: to show the language origin of the headword, and to give glosses of basic root meanings. Most of the EDL etymologies are adapted from the OED. However, we do include etymological insights from Webster’s 1844 dictionary where applicable. For example, the sense of kissing a person’s hand in Webster’s etymology of ADORE adds reverence to the relationship between the “Lady” and her “little Bird” in Poem J941/Fr925.

4. Webplay collocations appear in parentheses after the EDL etymology. Using an electronic WordCruncher concordance program, we have systematically documented lexical ties between sets of words in Dickinson’s poems and corresponding entries in Webster’s 1844 dictionary. For example, Dickinson uses the words worship, Glory, and adore in Poem J694/Fr717, and Webster uses similar terms in his definitions of adore.

5. EDL definitions usually consist of one-word glosses followed by longer explanations. So the synonyms “revere” and “admire” appear first in definition A of adore, followed by longer phrases such as “worship with profound reverence.”

Where relevant, sense plays, word plays, and figurative usages are marked in bracketed notes, as in definition B of the headword alphabet below. Biblical allusions and other cross-references appear in parentheses at the end of definitions. Idiomatic phrases are handled as separate definitions at the end of the headword entry.

6. Each definition is illustrated by a brief excerpt from a Dickinson poem containing that particular sense of the headword. The citation consists of the Johnson/Franklin poem numbers, followed by a quotation of the word in context. Registered users may change the poem number order to Franklin/Johnson by clicking on the Edit Profile option under the Profile tab. We try to include a main clause in each citation. If syntactic inversion or poetic ellipsis prevents illustrating the sense with a full clause, we have used punctuation dots (...) to make the thought as complete as possible. Dickinson’s word choice variants appear as headwords or in citations when they are the only example available for a specific sense. Such variant forms are marked with brackets within the citation and with a letter v next to the poem number. Dickinson’s line-end dashes are deleted at the end of citations to prevent orphaned dashes in the word-processing format.

7. The electronic format of the EDL website facilitates the inclusion of a reference list below most of the headword entries. The reference list gives the headword and many of its morphological variations as they appear in the Johnson edition of Dickinson's poems. The reference list may include some homographic forms that are not related to the headword. Words unique to the Franklin edition will not have a reference list.

Significance of the Emily Dickinson Lexicon Project

The purpose of the Emily Dickinson Lexicon is to provide a reference tool for examining the lexical intricacies of Dickinson’s poems, to supply definitions for translating the poems from English to other languages, and to provide information from Webster’s 1844 dictionary that Dickinson herself may have drawn upon.

The Emily Dickinson Lexicon will acquaint readers with biographical, historical, cultural, and linguistic aspects of Dickinson’s work. It will be a complement to reference works available now in Dickinson studies. Entries in the Lexicon will document the richness of Dickinson’s language for general and professional readers. The Lexicon will be especially valuable to translators who have learned English as an additional language. The EDL will help translators preserve the semantic richness of Dickinson in their target languages. Previous translations will be enhanced, and new translations will appear in more languages. Publications of selected poems can be expanded into editions of the complete poems.

In 1988, upon discovering the synonymy of “Dove” and “Columba” in Dickinson’s Poem J48/Fr65, I began a serious study of Dickinson’s words, using the Oxford English Dictionary and the 1985 American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. Karen Dandurand's Dickinson bibliography cited Richard Benvenuto's 1983 ESQ article on "Dickinson’s Use of the Dictionary," which called for further research on Dickinson and Webster connections. I wrote to Dr. Benvenuto at Michigan State University to see if he or others had continued or completed the research. The English Department chair was sad to inform me that Professor Benvenuto died of a brain tumor in 1987, at only 49 years of age.

Dr. Benvenuto's article inspired my 1991 doctoral dissertation on Philology as Rhetoric in Emily Dickinson’s Poems. As my dissertation research progressed, it became very clear that a lexical approach to Dickinson’s poems unlocks the power and meaning of her language. It also became clear that Dickinson readers could benefit from a lexicon tool similar to Alexander Schmidt’s 1971 Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary, so I completed my dissertation as a foundation for the lexicon project.

In August 1991, I began working on the lexicon project as a professor in the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University. I invited over thirty Dickinson scholars to participate in the project and received much encouragement. I also invited students in my classes to participate as apprentice lexicographers for the EDL, trying to follow the example of Dr. Calvert Watkins, who mentored Harvard graduate students as contributors to the appendix of Indo-European roots for the American Heritage Dictionary. I also kept in mind the many volunteers who contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary. I received department support, college funding, and a university Mentoring Environment Grant for the EDL lexicon project. I also applied for external funding, and in Fall 2007 the EDL website received the Albert J. Colton Fellowship for Projects of National or International Scope from the Utah Humanities Council.

Having read the biographies of Johnson, Webster, and Murray, I knew that lexicographers and their sponsors tend to optimistically underestimate the time it takes to complete a quality dictionary project. I had likewise hoped to finish the EDL sooner rather than later, but as the project progressed, I adjusted the timeline to allow for technology developments, a stylistic analysis, the Franklin edition of the poems, a syntactic analysis, and other exigencies. I also wanted as many people as possible to immerse themselves in Dickinson's language and the art of lexicography. I thank all of the EDL contributors and sponsors for their patience and faith.

Project Methodology

The guiding principle of the lexicon is description rather than prescription. The lexicon team strives to reveal rather than suppress the semantic potential of Dickinson’s words and idioms. Team members work towards clear, complete, and accurate entries without deliberately favoring or excluding any particular interpretation or critical stance. The EDL is designed to be a complement to primary texts and secondary sources now available in Dickinson scholarship. We rely on Dickinson’s own usage in the context of the poems as the primary authority for defining her words.

In addition to the corpus of poems, we have used S.P. Rosenbaum’s 1964 Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson (CPED) to create a master list of collated headword entries for the words in Dickinson’s poems. The CPED alphabetically indexes the majority of unique word-forms contained in the 1955 Johnson edition of Dickinson’s 1,775 poems, including variant words that Dickinson used in different drafts of a particular poem.

Noah Webster’s 1844 American Dictionary of the English Language has been an important tool for creating EDL entries because it documents the meaning of words in nineteenth-century American English and provides a cultural context for Dickinson's usage. The lexicon team also consults the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in preparing entries. Jack Capps’ book on Emily Dickinson’s Reading, articles in the Emily Dickinson Journal, and other scholarly works help us trace literary and historical allusions in the poems. An electronic WordCruncher concordance database enables us to track Dickinson word forms, Webster collocations, and Biblical allusions.

Final Product and Dissemination

After one year of peer review by scholars and users in the electronic website, the Emily Dickinson Lexicon will be submitted for publication as a hardcover reference book. For further reading on Emily Dickinson's philology, please see the EDL Bibliography under the Essays tab above.

Copyright © 2007–2008 Brigham Young University