The most attractive English dictionary of the sixteenth century was the Italian-English Worlde of Wordes, compiled by the language teacher John Florio and published in 1598. It registered more than 43,000 entries, as opposed to some 37,000 in the biggest contemporary Latin-English dictionary, the 1565 edition of Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus. The definition style is lively: mongrellino is “an effeminate, wanton, coy, fond smell-feast, a spruce-fellow.” The choice of headwords is eclectic: monina, “a womans geere or conie, a quaint as Chaucer calles it,” is followed shortly by monodo, “he that hath but one continued tooth in his mouth” (all three examples are from a single page [231], chosen because it is at the mid-point of the first edition). The second edition, Queen Anna’s New World of Words, was published in 1611, and offered some 70,000 entries.

A thorough edition of Florio’s dictionary would be most welcome. It would, as a minimum, do two things. First, it would present the 1598 entries together with the 1611 entries, showing which of the latter were new, and which were revised. Some of the revisions simply show Florio’s technique improving, while others are of further interest, for instance monsignore in 1598, “my lorde, a title onely for prelats,” which becomes in 1611, “my Lord, a title of honour and superioritie, heretofore giuen to Princes and great Lords, but now only to Prelates and Church-lords,” making a new point about the worldliness of the Catholic Church. Second, its commentary would, where possible, indicate Florio’s sources. He probably had monina, for instance, from a list of synonyms in Aretino; many of his definitions were taken over from Latin-English dictionaries. The commentary might go even further: which words, for instance, were registered in the more selective Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca of 1612? Which are the subject of noteworthy attention in other early modern dictionaries? (The entry for monina in the 1685 edition of Gilles Ménage’s Origini della lingua italiana deserves a note.)

This edition neither shows how Florio’s dictionary developed, nor where it came from. It claims on the title page to be a critical edition, but it is not. A critical editor makes choices between readings, and this edition simply offers a very lightly revised reproduction of the 1598 text: u/v and i/j are modernized, roman headwords and italic text become uppercase headwords and roman text, and variations from strict alphabetical order (which often show Florio’s sense of the relationships of words) are silently corrected, as are a few dozen typographical errors. This is copyediting, not textual editing, and it is the sort that introduces mistakes to a text. The transcription of the eighty-eight entries on page 231 of the original has, for instance, introduced mistakes into seven of them. They are not dramatic: a comma added, a comma lost; an accent lost; two spellings modernized; a for the in one entry and or for of in another. One obvious typographical error in the original — shiftings for siftings — has not been spotted. A couple of other spot checks show slightly lower levels of error: at 131, an Italian word is misread and two obvious errors in the original are overlooked (crue for cruel and wine for wire); at 331, an Italian word is misread and there are four smaller mistakes. The introduction remarks that “we do not know what method [Florio] used in compiling the dictionary” (xvii), but does not attempt to investigate the question; and it gestures to “Florio’s commitment to producing a dictionary with universal appeal” (xxix), but says nothing about who actually read the dictionary.

The Worlde of Wordes is freely available online in clear page images from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and keyed text of its entries can be searched through the freely available Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) database. It is, however, often preferable to study a dictionary in book form, and in that case, the crisply printed facsimile from Georg Olms Verlag is preferable to this edition, which adds no particularly useful editorial material to the 1598 text apart from tinkering, for better or for worse, with the alphabetical sequence, and is not scrupulously accurate.