Folklore in Regional Dictionaries: Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Examples from England

Abstract

Abstract Dictionaries are an increasingly acknowledged source of folklore data. For countries with early literacy, industrialization, and urbanization, such as England, this richness is evident for early modern and, especially, nineteenth-century dictionaries, such as those published by the English Dialect Society. Although not as numerous as before, regional dictionaries have, nevertheless, continued to be published in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This article surveys such publications from the point of view of what they might tell us about recent folklore. Might these works be as rich in folklore as their predecessors? And, if they are potentially useful folklore sources, what might be their especial virtues and what might be their blind spots? Do the generalizations it was possible to draw from the nineteenth-century material hold for works from this later period?