Nine years before the Oxford English Dictionary was finally completed, Sir William Craigie proposed his scheme of period dictionaries. Pointing to the many problems in the language still unsolved, and to the “large quantities of interesting material” daily set aside because of the limitations of space, he insisted that this was the only way to meet completely the needs of scholars in English language and of serious students of our literature. Neither he nor the others who have taken up his proposal have ever conceived of these period dictionaries as works to supplant the Oxford Dictionary. They could not because they approach the language with essentially different purposes. Sir William Craigie in his report of 1919 phrases quite clearly the relationship of these later dictionaries to their parent:

The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue is a natural complement to those of Middle and Early Modern English. It would have been unpractical to combine it with these, for several reasons. The period covered by it (mainly from 1375 to 1700) does not present any break comparable to that which distinguishes the earlier from the later period in English, and a division of the continuous Scottish material between two dictionaries would have been both inconvenient and unhistorical. The steadily increasing divergence between the two forms of the language would also lead to difficulties even in the Middle English dictionary, and would result in great confusion, and the inclusion of much irrelevant matter, in that of the Early Modern period. It would be impossible in the latter work to deal adequately with the Scottish variants of common words (e.g., ake, ald, atis, for oak, old, oats), or to give sufficient space to purely Scottish words and senses. The material for these could only be brought together by special collecting, and has in fact involved the close reading of printed books and manuscripts amounting to over 500 titles, a number of which extend to many volumes. A further very important consideration is the fact that for the successful handling of much of this material the editor must have a first-hand knowledge of the living Scottish tongue.

In order to bring to the readers of the PMLA some of our new material concerning the word sonnet and to have from them suggestions and criticisms concerning our proposed methods of presenting words in our dictionary we offer here our tentative article on this particular word. A comparison of the treatment here with that given the same word in the Oxford English Dictionary will make clear, we hope, the difference in the functions of the two dictionaries. Limitations of space have made it necessary to omit even a sample of the bibliographical key which will be published with each part of the dictionary.

Professor Louis B. Wright, in a very interesting paper on “Madmen as Vaudeville Performers on the Elizabethan Stage,” cites as one of his examples the madmen's scene of The Duchess of Malfi with the following comment: