| الملخص: | The story of the publication of dictionaries in early modern England is becoming increasingly well known, and is supported by an excellent infrastructure of short-title catalogues and digitized page images. The story of the ownership of dictionaries is a different matter. This paper will address two principal questions. First, which dictionaries, printed in England or abroad, appear to have been most widely owned in England before 1700? (The evidence to be examined in answering this question includes personal and institutional inventories, auction catalogues, and ownership marks in surviving copies). Second, to what extent is it possible to differentiate ownership and use: which dictionaries were most frequently cited? Were any marked up by readers? It is never possible to get definitive answers to questions like this about the early history of book ownership and reading, and this will necessarily be an exploratory paper, but it will at least give some indication of the dictionaries which really mattered in early modern England - which may not be identical with those which have received the most scholarly attention in recent decades.
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