The Bible Word-Book: A Glossary of Archaic Words and Phrases in the Authorised Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer

What it is about

The book is a glossary. It explains the words, phrases and constructions in the Authorised Version of 1611 (the King James Bible), and in the Book of Common Prayer, which are no longer in ordinary use. The preface says the aim is to explain and illustrate all such words in the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha. Each entry gives the sense, the verse where it occurs, and quotations from writers of the period (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Latimer, North's Plutarch, Hall and others) showing the usage. The entries are alphabetical. The first one, "A, An", shows that the choice of a or an before h was not uniform in 1611 ("a hard thing" next to "an hungred"), and that the prefix a- was used in forms like "a dying" and "a-hungry". The method is historical and philological: evidence comes from dated quotations. The book gives no statistics.

Ideas

• I1. Use the entries as a closed table of Early Modern senses for en/src/dict.rs and the early-modern lexicon, each sense with its verse and its date range. A sense is used only where the entry says it applies, so the choice can be explained.
• I2. Test the a/an and a- prefix entries with the en/src/emode.rs closed table: count how often the KJV text uses each form before h, and check that the rule picks the attested form. Run it on the Gutenberg texts handled by tools/gutenberg, twice, to confirm the result.
• I3. Negative control: a modern sentence with a word from the glossary ("bide", "bate") must keep its modern reading. The Early Modern reading should switch on only when the text is marked as biblical register.

For Mova

The chapters are 10. Vocabulary: archaic words and false friends and 11. The biblical style, and 2. Spelling, print conventions and tokens for the a/an forms. The code is en/src/emode.rs, en/src/dict.rs, and tools/gutenberg for the texts. The measure: coverage of glossary senses on KJV verses, and the negative control on modern text.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@book{wright1884bible,
  title = {{The Bible Word-Book: A Glossary of Archaic Words and Phrases in the Authorised Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer}},
  author = {Wright, William Aldis and Eastwood, Jonathan},
  year = {1884},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/thebiblewordbook00wriguoft}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/wright-1884-bible-word-book-glossary/