We're talking 1779 here--in Culpeper, VA. And the owner of "One Old Search"--to my knowledge--was no school master or otherwise intellectual. He was a VA farmer. I can't imagine he would have owned a dictionary--which were, in 1779, still rare in England. The earliest American Dictionary was Noah Webster's, published 1805. Early English Dictionaries: Few who see or read a play by Shakespeare realize that he wrote without access to an English dictionary as we know it. At his death in 1616, the only lexicons serving English were Edmund Coote's brief list of 1,368 words in his English Schoolmaster (1596) and Robert Cawdrey's list of 2,543 hard words in his Table Alphabeticall (1604). The lexicographical materials illuminating English for this period are very sizable, however, and until recently most have remained inaccessible to researchers. Throughout this period, many bilingual dictionaries published in England explained foreign-language word entries by English equivalents and commentary. Because these works listed their entries alphabetically by foreign-language word, there was no easy way--other than reading the work from start to finish--to discover how it used English words in the explanatory field of each entry. Ordinary concording software can of course "invert" these bilingual dictionaries, that is, reverse their directionality, so that foreign-language lemmas become the "explaining" words, and any English word hidden in the explanations of these non-English terms is automatically foregrounded within a virtual English dictionary word-entry. A computerized textbase enables us to re-sort or order entries by the words in which we are interested. What we discover is a wealth of information about the language people used in the period during which printing developed and modern English took shape. The English equivalents, foreign-language terms, and passages that comment on each Early Modern English word in the textbase represent the thought of several dozen English-speaking lexicographers alive in this period