PREFACE

When Giuseppe Pomba Giuseppe Pomba (1795–1876) was a prominent Italian publisher in Turin and the founder of the UTET publishing house conceived the grand idea (and for him, as a publisher, grand ideas were more frequent, and I am inclined to say more natural and familiar, than the foreseeable difficulties in bringing them to fruition, by which, no matter how great they were, he was determined and accustomed never to be daunted)—he formed, I repeat, the grand idea of publishing a complete dictionary of our nation’s language, prepared with a rational method, and placing at its head Tommaseo, the supreme lexicographer Niccolò Tommaseo (1802–1874) was a linguist and writer whose monumental dictionary remains a landmark of 19th-century Italian culture; an office was opened in Turin, in the very house of Pomba, to prepare and organize everything required for this great undertaking; linguistic texts, both printed and in manuscript, already excerpted excerpted (spogliati): the systematic process of reading historical and contemporary texts to extract words and usage examples for inclusion in a dictionary, or yet to be excerpted, or for checking existing excerpts against their sources; additions from common language as well as from scientific and artistic fields, provided by collaborators or scholars who, applauding...