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Excerpt from The Student's Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon
Saxon lexicography. I had hardly begun to work steadily at this dictionary when a Concise anglo-saxon Dictionary was brought out by Dr. Clark Hall (ch), an American scholar. CH is a work of great industry, and contains a good deal of new and valuable matter; but it is terribly uncritical, and embodies an enormous number of spurious words and meanings.
I have already said that this dictionary was undertaken as an abridgement of bt. But BT consists really of two fragments of dictionaries. The first part (a - fir), for which Bosworth alone is responsible, is far inferior to the succeeding portions of the work, which have been edited by Prof. Toller: these show a great and progressive improvement in fullness, accuracy and method. I have, of course, throughout checked and supplemented ET by the other dictionaries and glossaries - including my own glossaries to the anglo-saxon Reader and Oldest English Texts - and by a ms. Dictionary of my own, begun many years ago, when I had scarcely emerged from boyhood. CH has also been of considerable service, as he gives references for many of the rarer words. But the labour of testing these,7 and separating the grains of wheat from the mass of chaff, has been great, and has materially retarded my progress. I have also found time to gather a good deal of fresh material from the texts themselves.
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