Etymological Dictionary

Nathaniel Bailey published the first edition of Universal Etymological EnglishDictionary in 1721. It was the first to include pronunciation and etymology. It was a little over 900 pages long. In compiling his dictionary, Bailey borrowed greatly from John Kersey's Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1706), which in turn drew from the later editions of Edward Phillips's The New World of English Words. Like Kersey's dictionary, Bailey's dictionary was one of the first monolingual English dictionaries to focus on defining words in common usage, rather than just difficult words.

Although Bailey put the word "etymological" in his title, he gives definitions for many words without also trying to give the word's etymology. A very high percentage of the etymologies he does give are consistent with what's in today's English dictionaries.

In 1727, Bailey published a supplementary volume entitled The Universal Etymological English Dictionary, Volume II. Volume II, almost 900 pages, has some duplication or overlap with the primary volume, but mostly consists of extra words of lesser circulation.