English Dialect Dictionary Online: A New Departure in English Dialectology

Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905) is the most comprehensive English dialect dictionary ever written, documenting in detail every dialect of English in the British Isles and Ireland, as well as the USA, Canada, South Africa, and other colonial regions. Over the past ten years, it has been brought to life digitally as a freely available database resource, EDD Online, which provides access to this rich collection of dialect data. This book is a comprehensive user guide to EDD Online, showing how to get the most out of this unparalleled resource with step-by-step instructions, illustrated with handy screenshots, and an appendix containing full colour figures. It also considers dialectological issues from phonetics to pragmatics, and how searches can be tailored to specific linguistic concerns, demonstrating the interface’s enormous potential to contribute to research in a range of disciplines, from dialectology, to fields such as historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, lexicography and sociolinguistics.