A Chymical Dictionary

About This Edition

This edition brings the complete historical A Chymicall Dictionary into a new reading form. Its 706 definition paragraphs contain approximately 8,900 words. Each definition is retained in modernised English and accompanied by a Diotimos article that explains the wording, follows related senses and directs readers toward other entries. The dictionary can be consulted quickly for an unfamiliar name or read more slowly as evidence of an early modern language of nature.

The historical English text appeared in London in 1650 as a separately titled component of A New Light of Alchymie. The containing volume also printed works by Michael Sendivogius and nine books attributed to Paracelsus. Those neighboring works do not make Sendivogius the author of this dictionary. Institutional cataloguing identifies its English version with John French and its source with Gerhard Dorn’s Dictionarium Theophrasti Paracelsi. The present edition follows that attribution and describes the relationship as based on Dorn. Its modernisation is made from the 1650 English witness.

The dictionary’s own title announces its purpose: explaining difficult words and places encountered in Paracelsus and other obscure authors. Its reach is correspondingly wide. Solvents and metals sit beside plants, bodily conditions, instruments, mental faculties, celestial influences and spirits. A reader should expect connections among these subjects while attending to the precise relation supplied in each entry. A mineral virtue, a spiritual power and a bodily medicine can share explanatory language without becoming the same thing.

The historical text has been checked across all 48 pages of definitions in the Getty Research Institute copy available through Internet Archive. The online transcription supplied a useful starting point, but the printed witness governs the wording recorded in our source inventory. Differences affecting names or readings are explained in textual notes. The dictionary’s separate title page is also accounted for. Locators identify the original unnumbered dictionary through its position in the facsimile; they are distinguished from the pages of this edition.

The expanded articles are new editorial work. Their explanations are accountable to the historical definitions, to clearly identified comparisons within the dictionary, and to additional passages where these are cited. Their purpose is to make the old vocabulary usable without giving a short historical gloss the false appearance of a universal definition. The account of a term in this dictionary remains distinguishable from its use in another author.

New introduction, commentary, reading guides and indexes © 2026 Diotimos Editions. The historical 1650 wording is in the public domain. Bibliographical acknowledgments identify the institutions and transcription used in preparing this edition.