Giovanni IAMARTINO
University of Milan, Italy

It is the purpose of this paper to describe and comment on the lexicographical, linguistic and ideological features of The Ladies Dictionary, being a general entertainment of the fair-sex: a work never attempted before in English, published in London in 1694.

Specifically addressed to ladies, this 760-page work relies on the century-old tradition of educational treatises on women and for women, as well as the more recent, 17th-c. series of English monolingual dictionaries, which have always had upper- and middle-class women among their intended readership.

Its explicit educational goal makes The Ladies Dictionary a very interesting object for linguistic, lexicographical and cultural analysis:

• linguistically, it will be interesting to comment on the 'hard words' chosen by the anonymous compiler as entry words;
• lexicographically, both the macrostructure of the dictionary and the microstucture of the entries are worth analysing, as the content and aims of this work make it something in between a dictionary and an encyclopaedia;
• culturally, this text is meant to make entertaining, informative and educational reading, and inevitably provides contemporary ladies with a model that – inevitably again – is ideologically conditioned by the moral, cultural, social and political values of the age.