From Querimonious to Queen
Old dictionaries are the best kind of trap-door pursuit. They have a knack for jump-scare definitions. For example, the word “querimonious” in Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall (1604), has a brisk and accessible definition: “full of complaining, and lamentation.” The word’ itself ‘s meaning wears its origin on its sleeve: from Latin queror (“I complain”) and querimonia (“a complaint / grievance”).
And then comes the whiplash: in the same little alphabetical neighbourhood (remember, spelling still wasn’t truly locked in—standards only really harden later, especially in the 18th century as printers and dictionary efforts start policing “correct” forms), you can stumble on the word “queane.” The dictionary gives it one definition, and it is a doozy. I’m not giving it away—there’s a video below that explains it.
In A Table Alphabeticall (1604), “querimonious” and “queane” sit side by side with essentially the same dictionary status: each gets a brief gloss, no usage notes, no labels, no warning lights—nothing on the page tells you one is neutral and the other is loaded, or that one has a tidy Latinate pedigree while the other carries a very different punch. That’s the revealing part: in these early wordlists, the definitions can end up saying as much about the compiler’s assumptions, tone, and personal judgments as they do about how a word was actually used, and because the entries are so bare, it’s often impossible to trace where that attitude came from or how widely it was shared.
Robert Cawdrey wasn’t a committee: he was a working schoolmaster and Church of England clergyman (often described as having Puritan leanings), compiling a small “hard word” book for “Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons,” and he even credits its enlargement to his son Thomas, a London schoolmaster, signing off from Coventry in 1604. But there are no real documentary notes showing how he gathered, selected, or verified entries—no sources, citations, or method—because early “dictionaries” like this are often closer to curated wordlists shaped by specialty reading and personal interest. That’s why it helps to treat them less as authoritative dictionaries in the modern sense and more as compact, highly individual samples of someone’s written world.
A transcribed copy of A Table Alphabeticall:
https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/plainText/lexicon0820.txt