Phraseology and Culture in English

3. Later 
collections 
In the eighteenth century, the making of extensive collections of proverbs 
and proverbial phrases continued, though without much innovativeness in 
procedures for compiling them. In 1721 James Kelly published his Com-
plete Collection of Scottish Proverbs, Explained and Made Intelligible to the 
English Reader, about 3,000 Scottish sayings, briefly glossed, occasionally 
with parallels in other languages. Since most of the Scottish proverbs are also 
“English” proverbs, the glosses have value for the ascertaining of the sense 
and functions of archaic sayings in both dialects. Kelly commenced the 
long and regrettable tradition of explicitly “purifying” the stock of expres-
sions; he omitted not only ungodly “superstitious observations” and “those 
Proverbs that seem to make too homely with the Almighty,” along with 
“proverbial Imprecations with which the Scots abound,” but also sayings 
that “are openly obscene, and these are very many, pat, and expressive […]. 
[I]t does not become a man of my Age and Profession to write them.” Pre-
sumably for reasons of economy rather than piety or purity, he also omitted
“insignificant comparisons” (similes), “which can make no Man the wiser or 
better for using, or knowing them,” and “trifling By-Words, and proverbial 
phrases, I mean such as are equally silly and useless.” 
For his arrangement of entries, Kelly resorted to the old practice of al-
phabetizing by the very first word of proverbs; he regretted having encoun-

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Charles Clay Doyle 
tered too late the collection of “the ingenious Mr. Ray” (in print for 50 
years at the time!), with its superior method of identifying proverbs by key 
terms: “Otherways I had certainly imitated him in his rational Alphabetical 
Method.” To atone, Kelly attached an index of “principal” words. Several 
other collections of Scottish proverbs appeared during the next century-and-
a-half. Allan Ramsay was said to be so displeased with Kelly’s poor repre-
sentation of the Scots dialect that he published his own compilation in 1736 
(some 2,500 proverbs). Other collections of various sizes and arrangements 
(some with multiple editions) were published by Andrew Henderson (1832), 
Alexander Hislop (1862), Charles Mackay (1888), and Andrew Cheviot 
(1896), with little in the way of commentary or innovative presentation. 
Thomas Fuller’s famous Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs; Wise Sen-
tences and Witty Sayings, Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British (1732) 
was notable for the sheer quantity of its entries; including addenda. The 
proverbs (mostly English but some in other languages) are consecutively 
numbered 1–6,496. Of the sequencing of the entries, without glosses or 
annotations, Fuller acknowledged, “I use the alphabetical Order of the ini-
tial Words, not as any help to the Reader, but to my self, that I might the 
better avoid Repetitions.” 
Even as late as 1869, W. Carew Hazlitt’s English Proverbs and Prover-
bial Phrases had improved on its predecessors only in regard to the numer-
ousness of its entries, alphabetized in the old manner by first words, and its 
occasional citations of literary analogs or sources. The same was true of 
Vincent Stuckey Lean’s multi-volume Collectanea of Proverbs (English & 
Foreign), Folk-Lore, and Superstitions, posthumously published (and poor-
ly arranged) in 1902–1904. The most significant advance in the presenta-
tion of proverbial expressions since John Ray’s collection of 1670 came 
with G. L. Apperson’s English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases: A His-
torical Dictionary, 1929; the introduction calls the volume “a humble off-
shoot from the great parent stock of the Oxford English Dictionary.” In the 
first place, Apperson followed Ray in alphabetizing proverbs according to 
key substantive words, with occasional cross-references in the case of ex-
pressions with multiple key words. In the second place, he followed the 
O.E.D. in quoting, in chronological sequence, contextualized instances of 
each saying from printed sources. Even the magnificent example set by 
Apperson, however, did not immediately change the course of proverb 
compilations. W. G. Smith, editing the Oxford Dictionary of English Prov-
erbs in 1936, alphabetized by the first words, with 550 entries grouped by 
the initial article “A,” 900 by “The,” 920 by “He” (of those, almost half 

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Collections of proverbs and proverb dictionaries
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begin “He that ____”). In 1948, however, the second edition alphabetized 
the entries by key words. 
By the 1930s, as the discipline of folklore matured, a new generation of 
paremiologists was emerging (Apperson, for all his skill and wisdom, was 
neither a folklorist nor a philologist). Archer Taylor’s ground-breaking mono-
graph The Proverb appeared in 1931, the first comprehensive consideration 
in English of the nature of proverbs – their kinds, origins, structure, rheto-
ric, and applications. With the inspiration of Taylor and the example of 
Apperson, a new era of proverb “dictionaries” (as they were now called) 
dawned. Perhaps working independently, Bartlett Jere Whiting for a two-