Francis Grose

The Georgian soldier and antiquarian Francis Grose (1731-1791) wasn’t cut from the usual cloth of which lexicographers are made.

In order to research words and phrases for his dictionaries he bypassed the scholarly works in the local library and headed straight for the back-streets.

Grose was an enthusiastic, but untutored, researcher into historic artefacts and language, who believed that the language belonged to the people. His aim was to record the way people spoke, not how they were supposed to speak. His indefatigable inquiries have left us with a unique record of the English language, as it was spoken in Georgian England.

“Fizzle: A small windy escape backwards, more obvious to the nose than ears.”

Grose revelled in the lives and language of the underworld. He was down to earth and often bawdy, but as a linguistic man of the people rather than a rogue. He published numerous works on many subjects and was a friend to many notables of his day, including Robert Burns and the painter Christopher Pack.

Pack described his appearance as “Five feet high and weighing twenty-two stone, with a coat cut in the fashion of thirty summers ago.”

Other lexicographers made formal dictionary definitions of words or studied particular trades or callings. What Grose gave us was a collection of dictionaries that recorded the everyday speech of people of all trades and stations in life. Had he not done so, much of that speech, which was not put into print, would now be lost to us.

While works like Pride and Prejudice give us a picture of Georgian England as glimpsed through net curtains, Grose’s dictionaries take us out into the streets and alleys.

His most important work, the Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785, is a boon to etymologists.