I did not make a note of it at the time and now can no longer recall when I bought Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary, or indeed what prompted me to do so. All I can vouch for is that it was many years ago and not a random act. I have used it from time to time – as one does dictionaries – but mostly the six hefty volumes occupy their fourteen inches of shelf space, a calm steady presence. Together they weigh just short of three stones. The dictionary claims to be ‘the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the last two hundred years’ – a bold boast where living language is concerned. It was published in 1905, in London, by Henry Frowde, Amen Corner, E.C., and in New York by Putnam’s Sons, having already been issued in parts at intervals from June 1898. An enormous undertaking, it involved hundreds of contributing correspondents, mostly from England, but including fifteen from Ireland, six from Scotland and five from Wales, three of whom came from English-speaking south Pembrokeshire. The bibliography contains nine references to Wales, one of which refers the reader to ‘Shropshire’, compared with twelve double-column pages for Scotland. No doubt the problem for Wright was that Wales, especially the rural north and west, was still at that time predominantly Welsh-speaking, and of the few correspondents he recruited here, judging from their surnames, most were English incomers. Similarly, a chapter on pronunciation recognises ‘a sound like ch in German ich, nach, noch… common ...