New Solutions for Words in Thomas Speght's Chaucer Glossaries

Abstract

ABSTRACT:For his 1598 and 1602 editions of Geoffrey Chaucer's works, Thomas Speght (c. 1550–?) compiled extensive glossaries of Chaucer's "old and obscure words." Seventeen of the words listed remained "unidentified"—not traceable to any recognizable English words—in the comprehensive survey Early Modern English Lexicography (EMEL), published in 1989. All seventeen of these entries are accounted for here and traced to manuscript variants and corruptions or misprints in the text of Chaucer. The subsequent transmission of the words in later dictionaries (as ghost words in many cases) is described, as well as their usage by Chatterton, and an emendation is proposed for the text of Thomas Usk's Testament of Love (all[e] g[y]es at II.3.7–10).