Dictionaries

History of Dictionary

The origins of lexicography began with dictionaries of difficult words in classical texts. Early Greek language grammarians like Zenodotus and Aristophanes of Byzantium compiled glossai ("glossaries") listing unusual Homeric words. Unfortunately, these ancient dictionaries no longer exist.

Chinese dictionaries are the oldest extant lexicons. The anonymous (ca. 3rd century BCE) Erya arranged glosses from Chinese classic texts into 19 semantically arranged chapters. Yang Xiong's (1st century CE) Fangyan was the world's first dialect dictionary. Xu Shen's (121 CE) Shuowen Jiezi dictionary of Chinese characters was organized with an innovative system of 540 radicals (recurring graphic components).

Roman lexicographers edited dictionaries for Classical Latin texts. Verrius Flaccus compiled the (ca. 10 CE) De Verborum Significatu ("On the Meaning of Words"), which listed difficult terms and quoted usage examples. Although only fragments remain of Flaccus's original encyclopedic dictionary, De Verborum Significatu was abridged in the 2nd century by Sextus Pompeius Festus and in the 8th by Paul the Deacon.

The first dictionary of the Arabic language was the (8th century) Kitab al-Ayn ("The Book of Sources") compiled by Khalil ibn Ahmad.

The earliest English dictionaries were bilingual glossaries of Latin and French, for instance, Thomas Elyot's Latin Dictionary (1538). Lexicographer Sidney I. Landau describes the first monolingual English dictionaries.

The history of English lexicography usually consists of a recital of successive and often successful acts of piracy. Representing what may be the least inspiring of all seminal works, Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall of 1604 is generally accounted to be the first English dictionary. It incorporated almost 90 percent of the words of Edmund Coote's English Schoole-Master, a grammar, prayer book, and lexicon with brief definitions published in 1596. Moreover, about half of Cawdrey's three thousand entries were taken from a Latin-English dictionary of 1588, Thomas Thomas's Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae. (1998:35)

Although some believe Samuel Johnson's famous Dictionary of the English Language (1755) was the first true English dictionary, it was predated by Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656), John Kersey's A New English Dictionary (1702), and Nathan Bailey's An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721).

The lexicographer Noah Webster edited A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806) and An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), published by the G. & C. Merriam Company. Competing publishers put out other reference works entitled "Webster's Dictionary", and eventually the term became a genericized trademark for any English language dictionary. G. & C. Merriam reincorporated as Merriam-Webster, and continues to publish dictionaries. Their unabridged Webster's International Dictionary (2nd ed., 1934) claimed over 600,000 entries, but that inflated number was for word combinations not headwords; Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (1961) contained over 450,000 head entries.

For decades, the Oxford English Dictionary had the honor of being the world's "largest" dictionary; the second edition (1989) included 291,500 entries on 21,730 pages in 20 volumes. Currently, three dictionaries claim the title. The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal ("Dictionary of the Dutch language", 1998) has "half a million words covering 45,000 pages in 40 fat volumes, making it, according to the publicity, 'the biggest dictionary in the world'". According to the Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian (2005), "The twenty volumes of the Dictionary make up about 22,000 pages, comprising half a million headwords and over 11,000,000 words of text." The online Logos Dictionary claims to be "the largest dictionary in the world", with some 8 million entries in 232 languages