The English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) is the most comprehensive dictionary of English dialects ever published, compiled by the Yorkshire dialectologist Joseph Wright (1855–1930), with strong support by a team and his wife Elizabeth Mary Wright (1863–1958). The time of dialect use covered is, by and large, the Late Modern English period (1700–1903), but given Wright's historical interest, many entries contain information on etymological precursors of dialect words in centuries as far back as Old English and Middle English. Wright had hundreds of informants ("correspondents") and borrowed from thousands of written sources, mainly glossaries published by the English Dialect Society in the later 19th century, but also many literary texts written in dialect. In contrast to most of his sources, Wright pursued a scholarly linguistic method, providing full evidence of his sources and antedating modes of grammatical analysis of the 20th century. The contents of the EDD'''s nearly 80.000 entries (including the Supplement) were generally ignored during the 20th century but were made accessible by the interface of EDD Online, the achievement of an Innsbruck University research project first published in 2012 and repeatedly revised since (version 4.0 in March 2023).
Joseph Wright
Compulsory school education was not introduced in Great Britain until as late as 1870, so for Joseph Wright, born into a poor family in 1850, no school was available until he was 14 or 15. In his childhood, he had to work as a donkey-boy in a quarry and as a factory worker in a Bradford weaving mill. Yet he taught himself to read and write all by himself, started self-education on a large scale, attended night-schools, and soon had a good command of Latin, German and other languages and stages of languages, including Gothic and Middle English. After staying at German universities (Heidelberg, Leipzig) for over six years, he worked his way up in various teaching jobs, as a Deputy Professor and as secretary of the English Dialect Society, finally to be elected to a full Professorship of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford. This was in 1900, when he was just publishing the different parts of his English Dialect Dictionary.
The details of Wright's boyhood and of the romance of his remarkable career ("from donkey-boy to professor"), as well as the difficulties he encountered in publishing the English Dialect Dictionary, were presented in a biography written after his death in 1930 by his widow Elizabeth Mary Wright.
Publishing history of the English Dialect Dictionary
During the years immediately preceding the appearance of the first part of the dictionary (1898), Joseph Wright was widely regarded with scepticism concerning both the academic value of the project and its financial coverage. While vast dialect material was made available by the English Dialect Society, no publisher including Oxford University Press would take the pecuniary responsibility for a dictionary of the pre-conceived size. No well-established professor would be burdened by the foreseeably immense amount of drudgery work involved in such a project. However, Professor Walter William Skeat, founder and president of the English Dialect Society, had created a fund in 1886 (of which nearly half was his own money) for the initial collecting and arranging of the material for the dictionary. Arthur Balfour, at the time First Lord of the Treasury, made a grant from the Royal Bounty Fund which helped to complete the work.
After years of nerve-racking hesitation and consultation, Wright finally decided for himself as editor to publish the dictionary by subscription at his own risk. This intention required an enormous amount of activity to promote the planned dictionary and gaining distinguished persons and scholars as subscribers. While he found further sponsors, e.g. Clarendon Press, which provided him rooms for a "workshop", he was compelled partially to finance the project himself.Wright (1898). Vol. 1, pp. vii-viii.
Henry Frowde, publisher to the University of Oxford and no longer employee of Oxford University Press at the time, served as publisher. The six volumes appeared one at a time over eight years from 1898 to 1905, announced as "being the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the last two hundred years and founded on the publications of the English Dialect Society and on a large amount of material never before printed".
The content was issued progressively as 28 parts intended for binding into the six volumes with publication dates of 1898, 1900, 1902, 1903, 1904 and 1905. Vol. 6 includes the list of both printed and unprinted sources arranged by counties.