John Pickering's Reference Materials for His Vocabulary (1816): Transcending the Bounds of Dictionaries

John Pickering’s Vocabulary is judged to have been scarcely analyzed in detail, in spite of the fact that it is the first dictionary of Americanisms. (In this respect, the situation seems to be greatly different from the case of Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall (1604), the first English monolingual dictionary in England.) In this situation, it has been found recently that Pickering utilized wide range of dictionaries in the compilation process of the Vocabulary and that he may be worthy to be called an originator of comparative lexicography in America. However, there is another historically significant aspect concerning the dictionary. That is, Pickering exercised his ingenuity in providing abundant linguistic information by utilizing quite a few materials other than dictionaries. In this paper, I will deal with the aspect, aiming to further clarify the first stage of American lexicography.