Lynda Mugglestone

I usually teach first-year undergraduates in Trinity for Paper 1 (English Language), in which we explore language in areas such as news discourse, politics, advertising, as well as in relation to issues such as class, gender, and identity, and medium (including language online). 

I lecture on the English language side of the English course, covering a wide range of aspects of language history, language change and codification, language and identity, language and diversity. I also supervise undergraduate and graduate work on English language. Recent topics include politics and spin, gender and lexicography, and ideologies of race and gender in news discourse.

I have published widely on the social and cultural history of English, with particular reference to lexicography, lexical history, and the history of spoken English (and ideas of ‘talking proper’). I am interested in dictionaries as repositories of cultural opinion and sites of cultural change, and am always fascinated by what gets included – and what doesn’t. An on-going project looking behind the scenes at the making of the OED – and the words that didn’t make the cut –has been very rewarding.  Work on my last book was similar; this was based on the previously unexplored lexical scrapbooks made by Andrew Clark between 1914-1919 which deliberately excluded literary sources to focus on news discourse, ephemera, and advertising as the real sites of language change in a time of war.  My new project on Samuel Johnson’s annotated books, which formed part of research for his Dictionary in 1755, is a further aspect of this ‘behind the scenes’ approach. This began as part of funded project in 2024, setting up the ‘Desks, Drudgery, and the Dictionary’ exhibition in the garret in Johnson’s House in London (see Desks, Drudgery and the Dictionary | Dr Johnson's House…), and continued in 2025 in a Houghton Fellowship at Harvard. 

Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Writing a War of Words: Andrew Clark and the Search for Meaning in WWI (Oxford University Press, 2021).

‘Stranded in Time. Andrew Clark and the Language of WW1’. In Stranded Encyclopedias: broken dreams of complete knowledge (1700–2000) ed. Linn Holmberg and Maria Simonsen (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), pp. 229-257.

'Language', The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson (ed. Jack Lynch). (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2022), pp. 298-314. 

'Revisionary Texts. Examining the Editors' Proofs of OED1', Dictionaries. Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America (2023), pp.1-25.

'Voicing the Text – 'speakers', speakers, and the Performative Anthology', Spring 2025, in 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (https://19.bbk.ac.uk). Mugglestone | ‘Voicing the Text’: ‘Speakers’, Speakers, and the Performative Anthology | 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

(2025). ‘The Emerging Phonological Standard’, in The New Cambridge History of the English Language vol.III ed. Joan Beal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 246-70.

(2026) ‘Samuel Johnson and Francis Stewart: Collection and Collaboration in the Dictionary of the English Language (1755). In Dictionaries. The Journal of the Dictionary Society of America. Pp.1–25. 

‘Unheard voices, unseen hands; rethinking the making of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Forthcoming in: Expanding the database of Late Modern English: Unheard Voices, New Data, Other Perspectives. Edited by Javier Ruano-García, Pilar Sánchez-García & Paula Schintu. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (2026).