''Walker's Rhyming Dictionary'' was made by John Walker and released in 1775. It is an English

reverse dictionary A reverse dictionary is a dictionary alphabetized by the reversal of each entry: :kcots (stock) :kcotseid (diestock) :kcotser (restock) :kcotsevil (livestock) Before computers, reverse dictionaries were tedious to produce. The first computer-prod ...

, meaning that it is sorted by reading words in reverse order. As spelling somewhat predicts pronunciation, this functions as a

rhyming dictionary A rhyming dictionary is a specialized dictionary designed for use in writing poetry and lyrics. In a rhyming dictionary, words are categorized into equivalence classes that consist of words that rhyme with one another. They also typically suppor ...

. Laurence H. Dawson, in his Preface to the ‘Revised and Enlarged edition’ of Walker’s dictionary in the first half of the twentieth century, notes that: "Though it was never in the true sense a dictionary of rhymes, has been for over one hundred and fifty years a standard work of reference and has been a friend in need for generations of poets and rhymesters from

Byron George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the ...

downwards." Indeed, John Walker apologised for the book’s title, stating that the main purpose of his dictionary was to "facilitate the

orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and ...

and pronunciation of the English language". Dawson rejects the possibility of it being used for this purpose, claiming that it will instead be useful to "contributors to the 'Poets' Corner' or writer of humorous verse", "the

phonetician Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

", "the enthusiast for some new system of Simplified Spelling", and solvers of " Acrostics". Walker's original 1775 edition of the dictionary contained 34000 words, and Dawson's expanded twentieth-century edition added approximately 20000 more words to the volume. Michael Freeman's 1983 supplement enlarged the dictionary further, choosing to include slang and an increased numbers of words without Anglophone origins, for example, in the first 10 entries in his supplement include

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

, Brazilian,

Egyptian Egyptian describes something of, from, or related to Egypt. Egyptian or Egyptians may refer to: Nations and ethnic groups * Egyptians, a national group in North Africa ** Egyptian culture, a complex and stable culture with thousands of years of ...

Tatar The Tatars ()Tatar
in the Collins English Dictionary is an umbrella term for different

and

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

n words (p. 551). Proper nouns are not, by and large, covered by the dictionary, although some exceptions are made "for a number the pronunciation of which are not self-evident". It also has some Scots words, including callant, hogmanay, wrongous, een, tolbooth, and wis/wist (although it is not a regular word)..

References

{{Reflist English dictionaries Rhyme