George William Lemon (1726 – 4 October 1797) was an English clergyman, schoolmaster, and philologist, best known as the author of an early etymological dictionary of the English language, published in 1783.
Life and Career
Lemon was born in 1726 and graduated from Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1748. He took holy orders and was presented in 1755 to the vicarage of East Walton, Norfolk, and to the rectory of Gaytonthorpe (now the consolidated living of East Walton with Geytonthorpe). He served as master of Norwich School (then Norwich Free Grammar School) from 1769 to 1778. He also held the livings of Mundham St Peter and St Ethelbert, and Seething, though he was never formally instituted to them.
Lemon married Elizabeth Young (1735 – 25 September 1804) on 31 May 1760. Both are buried in East Walton.
English Etymology (1783)
Lemon's principal work, English Etymology; or, a Derivative Dictionary of the English Language: In Two Alphabets, was published in London in 1783. In it, he considered the English language as founded on six older idioms:
- "The Hebrew, or Phoenician" (Semitic)
- "The Greek"
- "The Latin, or Italian" (Romance)
- "The Celtic, or French"
- "The Saxon, Teutonic, or German" (West Germanic)
- "The Icelandic, and other Northern dialects" (North Germanic)
The entries focus predominantly on English words of Latin or Greek derivation. Because the work was published twenty years before the discovery of Grimm's law, Lemon's etymologies of Germanic words are often unsound by modern standards—for example, he derived acorn from Greek akros, and addle from Greek athlos. Nevertheless, the 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, which mark the beginning of modern linguistics.
Ralph Griffiths' Monthly Review in 1785 (vol. 71, pp. 171–177) reviewed Lemon's dictionary with a characteristically vivid metaphor:
"The author, perched on his etymological dunghill, claps his wings, and crows in defiance of all who have scraped the dunghill before him. He hath found jewels which escaped their superficial search; and, like a cock of wisdom, knows how to use them when he hath found them; — and is disposed to call us fools for not comprehending their value."
Other Works
- Two Tracts (London, 1773), containing (a) "Additional Observations on the Greek Accents, by the late Edward Spelman, esq." (edited by Lemon) and (b) "The Voyage of Æneas from Troy to Italy," intended as specimens of a projected new translation of Virgil.
- Græcæ Grammaticæ Rudimenta (1774), a Latin grammar of Greek.
- The History of the Civil War between York and Lancaster, comprehending the lives of Edward IV and his brother Richard III (Lynn, W. Whittingham, 1792).
