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Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionary: word searchable and then page imagesProverbs from the Cotgrave Dictionary divided into categories, including food.

A Word Searchable version of the Cotgrave Dictionary, one of sixteen dictionaries available from this University of Toronto site. This version requires that you have an academic affliation.

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What was bread like in France in the early 1600’s? Where can we go for information about bread before recipes were regularly written down? One source is dictionaries. In the process of doing research for my forthcoming book on the history of European loaf breads, tentatively scheduled for publication by Ten Speed Press in 2007, I have looked through dozens of dictionaries published between 1600 and 1800. The best of the best is Randle Cotgrave’s Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, published in 1611. Cotgrave’s definitions of French breads are terrific. His definitions constitute the longest list of early sixteenth century breads that I have so far found. But it is not just that Cotgrave included many types of bread in his dictionary, others also provided lists, and it is that his definitions are both informative and evocative.The Cotgrave entry for bread begins as follows:

The entry continues onto two more pages. Click here for a PDF of the complete bread entry in Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 dictionary. For those of you not used to seventeenth century typography, there is a letter that resembles an “f” that is really and “s.” Thus the world “alfo” is pronounced “also.” If you are new to this typography, just think of it as a little puzzle. It doesn’t take long to get the hang of it.

Amongst the first few breads in Cotgrave, listed above, is the intriguing Pain d’Argus — a bread with many eyes. As you read the entries in the PDF you will find many more breads that are intriguing, including a Pain Sarain that is described as being “verie yellow.” As there is an entry in Cotgrave for semolina, I am assuming that this is bread made from yellow wheat, but I am hoping that one of my readers will know for sure and let me know.

There are two searchable Cotgrave dictionaries online. You will find the links to them at the top of the right hand column. The first of the two links does not require registering.

Randle Cotgrave’s dictionary has been influential. Approximately 6,000 citations from Cotgrave are in the Oxford English Dictionary. However, as I am not a scholar in this field, I refer you to a talk on dictionaries that includes information on Randle Cotgrave given by Richard W. Bailey. The talk is titled Old Dictionaries, New Knowledge.

The entire talk is interesting, but I excerpt below the portion that relates to Cotgrave. Much of what Bailey talks about with respects to other words in the dictionary applies also to the bread terms — he may not always have been clear — but he has always written with verve.

“At this point, our inquiry turns to Randle Cotgrave’s Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues of 1611. In it are found words that are in common use today, for instance botanic and medallion, that do not appear in non-dictionary English until half a century later. Thanks to Cotgrave, we know that they existed earlier. Cotgrave defines pimpompet as “a kind of game wherein three hit each other on the bumme with one of their feet.” As this definition shows, Cotgrave was not always entirely clear as an explainer (though few can compete with him in lexicological verve); the object and rules of pimpompet (or bumdockdousse) remain, perhaps fortunately, shrouded in mystery. Bumdockdousse — which we might gloss as “rump-thwacking” or maybe “butt-kicking” — probably did not gain wide currency as either a word or a sport in Britain, but thanks to Cotgrave we know a little more about what sort of game it was. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary recognized the worth of Cotgrave’s Dictionaire, and it is quoted there more than 6,000 times. Perhaps the most significant testimony to his value is the OED use of the label “not in Cotgrave” as evidence that some word from French appearing later did not exist in English at the beginning of the seventeenth century. By going back to Cotgrave to elucidate Urquhart’s bumdockdousse, Murray added — however minutely — to our understanding of sport and of Rabelais.”

If you are inspired by Cotgrave’s bread definitions and make breads inspired by them, please drop me a note to let me know what you have done.

Note: The text excerpted above is by Richard Bailey, Department of English, and University of Michigan. It is from his Second-day keynote speech of Conference on Early Dictionary Databases (Toronto, October 1993)

(Copyright) Editors of CHWP 1996. [First published in CCH Working Papers, 4 (1994) and Dictionnairique et lexicographie, 3 (1995).]