George William Lemon

Who was George William Lemon?

The Reverend George William Lemon was the author of an early etymological dictionary of the English language, published in 1783.

Lemon graduated at Queens College, Cambridge in 1748. He was Rector of Geytonthorpe, Vicar of East Walton, Norfolk from 1755, and master of Norwich School from 1769 to 1778.

Lemon considered the English language as founded on six older idioms:

"The Hebrew, or Phoenician"

"The Greek"

"The Latin, or Italian"

"The Celtic, or French"

"The Saxon, Teutonic, or German"

"The Icelandic, and other Northern dialects"

The entries consequently focus on English words of Latin or Greek derivation. Twenty years before the discovery of Grimm's law, Lemon could not be expected to give sound etymologies of Germanic words, and promptly derived acorn from Greek akros, or addle from Greek athlos. Yet Lemon's dictionary is of historical interest as a pioneer work of philology on the eve of the discoveries of William Jones, Friedrich Schlegel and Rasmus Rask that mark the beginning of modern linguistics.

Ralph Griffiths' Monthly Review in 1785 reviewed Lemon's dictionary, somewhat ironically, as an extraordinary and delectable work: