OED Online: "Who dares finde faulte with so promontorious a celsitude?"

Conference item

Thomas Adams, who published from 1612 to 1652, was not neglected in NED. The dictionary's 'List of Book Quoted' (at the end of the 'First Supplement', 1933), gives sixteen titles, good coverage of his total of twenty-five publications, plus his collected works (so far) of 1629, with a further reference, ominously, to an 1861-62 republication of his collected works. Adams was a great preacher, learned, witty, and humane, a divine of a great period of English sermonizing, before to sermonize had become, in OED terms, 'chiefly depreciatory'. Witty, because of his frequent high-class wordplay, literary and far removed from slang. He loved words, not as a lexicographer or lexicologist, but as a user of words; and he loved the Word, for some of his title-pages, from the first year of his publishing onwards, The Gallants Burden. A Sermon preached at PAVLES CROSSE (1612) give his calling as 'Preacher of Gods Word at Willington in Bedfordshire'. Though the incumbent of a tiny country parish, he is not parochial, and often preached in London, thus at Paul's Cross. One of his longer works (in fact, the Summe of Diurse Sermons) is The Happines of the Church (1618), two parts vii + 433 and 375 pages long. The quotation in my title comes at 1, p. 9, of The Happines. My paper is the result of working at that one, long book to see how well it had been read for NED, now conveniently checkable by consulting OED on line. I did find a few things on which to comment, of (pedantic?) interest, at least to me: on the whole, OED's coverage was found to be very good when put to the test.

Authors: Stanley, E

• Alternative title: Presented at Editors, Collaborators, and Readers: the OED session
• Publication status: Not published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Edition: Author's Original
• Language: English
• Keywords: Oxford English Dictionary
• Subjects: English Language and Literature