HOW THE GLOSSARY WORKS
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ntries relating to each line of Shadow Text are shown below thatline. In cases where a glossed word appears more than once in aline, plus signs are used if necessary to highlight theparticular word being glossed. For example, in the line: Till some end they find, +or+ in or out, it is the first "or" which is glossed. Editorial policy in the Glossary is as follows. Words whichappear in modern concise dictionaries and whose meanings areunchanged are rarely glossed. The reader is expected tounderstand words such as "quoth", "hither", and "aught" in their_modern_ senses. Where an apparently modern form has a differentcontextual meaning, it is glossed; and where the modern sense isalso to be understood, this is included in the definition.Similar senses are grouped with commas; changes in sense areindicated by semicolons. For example: sad > heavy, heavily laden; sad The commoner obsolete forms have been silently converted: "thee"to "you", "dost" to "does", "mought" to "might", "whenas" to"when", and so on. Others (generally speaking, those less commonwords sufficiently distinct from their modern counterparts tomerit a separate entry in the _Shorter Oxford EnglishDictionary_) have been unified to the spelling preferred by thatand its parent dictionary. This should allow the reader, duringvery close scrutiny of any passage, quickly to find any ofSpenser's words in the _OED_. All the Glossary entries are context-sensitive: Spenser oftenuses the same word in several different ways. Thus no singleGlossary entry should be taken as generally definitive.
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