A RHYMING DICTIONARY: ANSWERING AT THE SAME TIME THE PURPOSES OF SPELLING, PRONOUNCING, AND EXPLAINING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. RHYMING DICTIONARY: ANSWERING AT THE SAME TIME THE PURPOSES OF SPELLING, PRONOUNCING, AND EXPLAINING A COFICUS INTRODUCTION TO THE VARIOUS USES OF THE WORK, WITH CRITICAL PRONUNCIATION, AND RHYME; AND, FOR THE PURPOSE OF POETRY, IS ADDED AN INDEX OF ALLOWABLE RHYMES, WITH AUTHORITIES FOR THEIR USAGE FROM OUR BEST POETS. BY J. WALKER, AUTHOR OF THE "CRITICAL PRONOUNCING DICTIO I New Edition, Rebised and Enlarg BY J. LONGMUIR, A.M., LL.D., Author of "Walker and Webster Combined in a Dictionary of the English Language," do LONDON: WILLIAM TEGG. 1865. 302 915) e THE EDITOR'S PREFACE. JOHN WALKER, whose name is familiar to every student of the orthoepy of the English language, published his Rhyming Dictionary in 1775, twenty years after the publication of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, and sixteen before the appearance of his own Critical Pronouncing Dictionary. A second edition, however, was not required till 1806, and, as Walker had been an Actor before he became a Teacher of Elocution in London, he naturally dedicated his work to David Garrick, to whose pronunciation on the stage, and frequent advice in the prosecution of his inquiries, he gratefully acknowledges his obligations for no small measure of whatever merit his work might possess. We have not had an opportunity of ascertaining the dates of all the subsequent editions; but we believe the last was printed in 1851. Walker certainly had the merit of first producing a work of this sort in the English language on such an extensive scale; for the work of Bysche to which he refers, and of which the fourth edition was printed in 1710, extends to only thirty-six pages, on each of which are four columns of words without accent or explanation, which amount to a number between six and seven thousand, whereas the present work may claim the title of a sufficient dictionary of the language. A Rhyming Dictionary, properly so called, ought to bring together all those words that have the same terminal sound, although they may not end in the same letters; but such a collocation would have complicated the difficulty of finding a particular word and excluded some of the other advantages which the present arrangement affords. Hence words that are brought together on account of the similarity of their spelling, such as |