Before the Word was Queer

Bringing together research from queer linguistics and lexicography this book uncovers how same-sex acts desires and identities have been represented in English dictionaries published in Britain from the early modern to the inter-war period. Moving across time from the appearance of the rst standalone English dictionary to the completion of the rst edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and shuttling across genres from general usage hard words thieves'' cant and slang to law medicine classical myth women''s biography and etymology it asks how dictionary-writers made sense of same-sex intimacy and how they failed or refused to make sense of it. It also queries how readers interacted with dictionaries'' constructions of sexual morality against the broader backdrop of changing legal religious and scientic institutions. In answering these questions the book responds and contributes to established traditions and new trends in linguistics queer theory literary criticism and the history of sexuality.