Randle Cotgrave

Randle Cotgrave (* 16th century ; † 1634 ) was a British Romanist and lexicographer.

life and work

Cotgrave graduated from Cambridge University . He was secretary to William Cecil, 2nd Earl of Exeter (1566-1640, son of Thomas Cecil, 1st Earl of Exeter, 1542-1623), to whom he dedicated his French-English dictionary from 1611, which is important in terms of linguistic history. Desiring to make sixteenth-century French literature accessible to his English users, Cotgrave included much of the lexical material that was missing from contemporary French dictionaries.

Works

• A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues , London 1611, Columbia 1950, 1968, Menston 1968, Hildesheim 1970, Amsterdam 1971, London 1974, 2 vols., Geneva 2011 (foreword by Jean Pruvost; introduction by Susan Baddeley); with: Robert Sherwood, A Dictionarie English and French, London 1632, 1650, 1660, 1672 (from 1650 with additions by James Howell )

literature

• Vera A. Smalley, The sources of A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues by Randle Cotgrave , Baltimore 1948
• Hélène Naïs, Le "Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues" by Randle Cotgrave. Réflexions sur la méthode de ce lexicographe, in: Verba et Vocabula. Festschrift Ernst Gamillscheg , Munich 1968, pp. 343–357
• Michèle Schmidt-Küntzel, Cotgrave and his Rabelaisianisms. Synchronic and diachronic analysis , Cologne 1984
• Franz Josef Hausmann, 309. La lexicographie bilingue anglais-français, français-anglais, in: Dictionaries. Dictionaries. Dictionnaires. An international handbook on lexicography. Third volume , ed. by Franz Josef Hausmann , Oskar Reichmann, Herbert Ernst Wiegand and Ladislav Zgusta , Berlin. New York 1991, pp. 2956-2960

Web links

• Literature by and about Randle Cotgrave in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)