We all think we know what a dictionary is for and how to use one, so most of us skip the first pages the front matter and go right to the words we wish to look up. Yet dictionary users have not always known how English works and my book reproduces and examines for the first time important texts in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dictionary authors explain choices and promote ideas to readers, their end users. Unlike French, Spanish, and Italian dictionaries compiled during this time and published by national academies, the goal of English dictionaries was usually not to purify the...