How are dictionaries shaped by social history, and how far do dictionaries themselves shape social history? Wordlists and dictionaries (broadly defined) reflect particular perspectives and may be adapted for new audiences. This chapter maps the most significant historical intersections of English dictionaries and Anglophone societies. It spans the shift from English as a colonized to a colonizing language, from the medieval period to around 1900. Its building blocks include intersecting conceptions of gender roles, the family, social status, work and industrialization, as well as urbanization and racialization. Some other concepts remain implicit. Education (inside as well as outside the home) interconnects every section. It was in religious contexts that Latin was codified and methods were perfected for organizing words within books as well as books within libraries. The idea of the nation was later shaped by the Oxford English Dictionary with history and by the state with nineteenth-century mass primary education. Overall, tensions between human agency and determinism are brought constantly into the foreground. The focus on English lets me contrast revisions of the ‘same’ text within the limits of a handbook chapter. My anecdotal approach relates social changes to identifiable revisions and initiatives by individual lexicographers.

Gerard Woodward explores Plath’s complex relationship with the culture of food and cookery on both sides of the Atlantic and helps us to understand the ways in which food works in her poetry and fiction. Plath was a compulsive observer and cataloguer of what she ate and what she cooked. Yet the times she lived in were ones of great contrasts and upheavals in the social and cultural attitudes towards food in Britain and the United States. In Plath’s birth country food remained central to the American ideal of wholesomeness, represented most emphatically by Rombauer and Becker’s The Joy of Cooking, which Plath treasured. In Britain the national cuisine had been devastated by the Second World War and years of rationing. At the same time, in both countries, food was slowly acquiring new powers as a marker of status and aspiration, particularly for women.