The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English vocabulary witnessed a sort of revolution due to the massive influx of new words and coinages primarily from classical languages. They were largely introduced by scholars to supply English with an appropriate terminology for fields traditionally dominated by Latin, but also to provide the richness of vocabulary (copia verborum) considered the hallmark of a literary language and Renaissance rhetoric as well as a sign of education or social superiority. Their ‘artificiality’ and ‘abstruseness’ provoked a fierce debate among purists and innovators, and made necessary the production of dictionaries that explain such ‘hard words’, and often attest them for the first time. A sign of the creativity of these centuries, most of them remained in the language and contributed to shaping the structure vocabulary, thanks also to the role played by monolingual dictionaries. A text-corpus analysis of new coinages derived from ‘hard words‘ dictionaries in a so-far neglected genre – namely early modern street literature texts (pamphlets, broadsheets and ballads) devoted to monstrous births – will shed light on the mechanisms of their diffusion.

This chapter explains the evolution of ‘hard-word’ dictionaries in English lexicography during the seventeenth century. Through a discussion of how lexicography and natural philosophy were emerging and how scientific methods were being applied to language, it traces the development of dictionaries and what kinds of information went into them. We see that the first monolingual dictionaries were lists of words; subsequently, those lists included short definitions of terms borrowed from other languages. Soon, dictionaries provided definitions of technical terms and jargon – the ‘hard words’ – and finally, dictionaries developed into encyclopedic reference works that added information on the history and development of the language and practical uses of a dictionary for words in general use. Last, the chapter details a famous case of lexicographical plagiarism to present how the concept of authorship has changed over time.