This book deals with monolingual English dictionaries from 1604 to 1702. The major scholarly reference works which individually treat early English dictionaries are De Witt Starnes and Gertrude Noyes’s English Dictionaries from Cawdrey to Johnson: 1604-1755 (1946) and The Oxford History of English Lexicography (2009) edited by A. P. Cowie.

However, when we proceed with reading the dictionaries with primary attention to their provision of lexical information, an array of deficiencies in Starnes and Noyes’s account stands out. There are two main reasons for these deficiencies; one is the fact that Starnes and Noyes’s analyses of the dictionaries are mainly made in accordance with the contents of their title pages and introductory materials, and the other is that the two authorities are excessively conscious of the external history of the dictionaries they discuss.