Peter Levins’ lexicographic approach

The aim of the paper is to shed light on the productivity of Peter Levins' "Manipulus Vocabulorum". We notice that Levins was a keen lexicographer; indeed, recent studies have already highlighted the fact that his dictionary is the first in the history of English lexicography in which hard or obsolete words are listed or mentioned. Moreover, Levins also recorded a number of words which had apparently been left unregistered before the publication of the "Manipulus". Yet such lexicographic accuracy is not accompanied by an adequate etymological analysis of the lemmas presented. Indeed, in the preface to the text the author overtly mentions word-formation rules as an integral part of his work and when developing his book he purposefully scatters here and there a great number of notes explaining the etymology of the words presented in the dictionary; yet he often proves to be inaccurate and faulty, since not only does he fail to identify the right suffixes in some cases, but he also fails to recognise the exact etymology of a number of lemmas, by confusing French, Latin and English roots.