Stabilising the scientific lexicon in eighteenth-century British encyclopædias and specialised dictionaries : a focus on medical terminology

The general aim of this research is to illustrate how scientific terminology was stabilising in eighteenth-century British specialised dictionaries and in universal dictionaries of arts and sciences. These were encyclopaedic works in alphabetical order, which “sought to combine alphabetical entries with deference to the classification of knowledge” (Yeo 2001: 27). Recurrent lexical items, frequent patterns of disciplinary thinking, and emerging communicative conventions highlight the complexity of the scientific process through time (Taavitsainen et al. 2014: 148). They also reveal the underlying mechanisms which define the medical lexicon, and medical writing in general, as specialised language use, as “medical group language” (Gunnarsson 2011: 305).