Lewis Topographical Dictionaries

Samuel Lewis produced a series of "Topographical Dictionaries" in the early 19thC. These were large and impressive publications with a list of places together with associated maps and indexes. The text describing places was often very long and covered subjects such as Ecclesiastical Management, Soil Conditions, Farming Standards, Houses of Note, and Schools.

The Lewis Topographical Dictionaries are available on the Internet Archive website in pdf format. The data below has been derived by processing the Lewis pdf files as follows:

The intention has been to produce a placename gazetteer rather than the complete dictionary provided by Lewis. The full text of each entry has been made available, linked from the Placename field. However, because the OCR is imperfect, and it was never intended that good quality text should be provided, imperfections (sometimes significant) remain in the text files.

Notwithstanding the intention to produce only a placename gazetteer, in the case of London, Norwich and York, the text has been reformatted in order to retain Lewis' tables of parishes, livings, etc.

The fields for each country differ slightly because of the specific country's administrative structure, e.g., Ireland has Provinces and Baronies whereas Scotland has Wards, Districts and the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. England has been divided into the 4 volumes provided by Lewis.

The extracted data consists of:

Qualifications such as "partly" and "chiefly" have been actioned. Special cases such as "Queen's county" have been recognised.

Health Warnings:

The following dictionaries have been completed and the indexes are available below:

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