I owe thanks to many since 1985, when historical dictionaries first claimed me, and 1996, when the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database came online, and 2006, when LEME itself emerged. In recent years, as the corpus was being sculpted, I acknowledge the financial, material, and human support of many angels. First among them is Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and its hard-working, unsung reviewers and evaluation committees. Then there is the University of Toronto Library (Chief Librarian, Larry Alford) with his gifted Information Technology Services team (Sian Meikle, Director; Kelli Babcock, Digital Initiatives Librarian; Rachel Di Cresce, project librarian; and Monica Ung, Application Programmer Analyst, among many others), and its Library Security team (led by Susan Gropp). Just this year, Priya Murugalah (Manager, Infrastructure), Information and Instructional Group (IIT), Arts and Science, has helped us prepare and generate this book; and SciNet, Canada’s largest supercomputer centre, gave us resources for our lemmatizing work. LEME itself was created by a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to the TAPoR Group (McMaster University, with the Universities of Victoria, Alberta, Toronto, Montreal, and New Brunswick). LEME staff over these past four years include no fewer than eighteen University of Toronto undergraduates and graduate students: Julia DaSilva, Sky Li, Timothy Aberdingk Thijm, Shirley Wang, Eric Schnell, Kristie Lui, Dr. Paramita Dutta, Sharine Leung, Xueqi (Sherry) Fan, Lisa Marando, Annika Sparrell, Cassandra Olsen, Kristen Zimmer, Leah Stephens, Mandy Pipher, Rachael Tu, Victoria Liao, and my co-editor and assistant, Isabelle Zhu. Without them, there would be no corpus and no book. We call ourselves lemmings because every grant ends at the edge of a cliff, and yet I do not doubt but that their time at LEME has helped feather their wings. I have been very fortunate to have worked with these students over several decades, and to have benefited from the University of Toronto’s Work-study program. I am also most grateful for the many encouragements I received from the University of Toronto Press, LEME’s publisher, and from the LEME Advisory Board, notably Carol Percy, Chad Gaffield, Paul Schaffner, Gabriele Stein, and David Vancil.
Any errors in the corpus belong to this editor. Texts have been checked several times, but they will include errors of transcription and interpretation. I will be glad to hear of mistakes so that I can correct them. In the words of John Minsheu at the close of his Ductor in Linguas (1617), I “doe in all things submit my selfe, and doings, to the censure of the wiser sort, discreete and learned.” And as John Bullokar says at the close of The English Expositor (1616), “Meanewhile vse this as you finde it, and I perswade my selfe your honesty will say it is worth the money you paide for it.”
IL 22 November 2019