Antique Reference Book Entitled CRITICAL PRONOUNCING DICTIONARY by John Walker (1732 – 1807) | Published in New York by Collins & Hannay, 1828 | 1/2 Leather over marbled boards; Tanning to margins, with scattered foxing marks to prelims, etc. | Approx. Dimensions: 9" H x 5.25" W x 2.25" D | A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language is dictionary authored by John Walker (1732 – 1807), a British elocutionist and lexicographer. Walker published several works, including Exercises for Improvement in Elocution in 1777 and The Melody of Speaking in 1787. Walker's most influential work was his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, which was originally published in 1791 in Britain and in the United States for the first time in 1803. In his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, which has been reprinted over 100 times since its publication, Walker sets out 545 rules for the correct pronunciation of words in the English language, including rules for people with Irish or Scottish accents to follow in order to produce more “cultured” accents. Walker’s work became one of the foremost authorities on English linguistics, and his system of using marks and numbers to indicate stressed syllables has remained influential in modern linguistics. Book is listed in the Jefferson Inventory of Wythe's Library as "Walker's dictionary. 8vo." This was one of the titles kept by Thomas Jefferson and later sold to the Library of Congress in 1815.