The oldest known dictionaries were
cuneiform tablets with bilingual
Sumerian–
Akkadian wordlists, discovered in
Ebla (modern
Syria) and dated to roughly 2300 BCE, the time of the
Akkadian Empire. The early 2nd millennium BCE
Urra=hubullu glossary is the canonical
Babylonian version of such bilingual Sumerian wordlists. A
Chinese dictionary, the
Erya, is the earliest surviving monolingual dictionary; some sources cite the
Shizhoupian (probably compiled sometime between 700 BCE to 200 BCE, possibly earlier) as a "dictionary", although modern scholarship considers it a calligraphic compendium of
Chinese characters from
Zhou dynasty bronzes.
Philitas of Cos (fl. 4th century BCE) wrote a pioneering vocabulary
Disorderly Words (Ἄτακτοι γλῶσσαι, ''
) which explained the meanings of rare Homeric and other literary words, words from local dialects, and technical terms. Apollonius the Sophist (fl. 1st century CE) wrote the oldest surviving Homeric lexicon. The oldest existing Japanese dictionary, the Tenrei Banshō Meigi, was also a glossary of written Chinese. In Frahang-i Pahlavig'',
Aramaic heterograms are listed together with their translation in the
Middle Persian language and phonetic transcription in the
Pazend alphabet. A 9th-century CE Irish dictionary,
Sanas Cormaic, contained etymologies and explanations of over 1,400 Irish words. In the 12th century, The
Karakhanid-
Turkic scholar
Mahmud Kashgari finished his work "
Divan-u Lügat'it Türk", a dictionary about the Turkic dialects, but especially
Karakhanid Turkic. His work contains about 7500 to 8000 words and it was written to teach non Turkic Muslims, especially the Abbasid Arabs, the
Turkic language.
Al-Zamakhshari wrote a small Arabic dictionary called "Muḳaddimetü'l-edeb" for the Turkic-Khwarazm ruler
Atsiz. In the 14th century, the
Codex Cumanicus was finished and it served as a dictionary about the
Cuman-Turkic language. While in
Mamluk Egypt, Ebû Hayyân el-Endelüsî finished his work "Kitâbü'l-İdrâk li-lisâni'l-Etrâk", a dictionary about the
Kipchak and
Turcoman languages spoken in Egypt and the
Levant. A dictionary called "Bahşayiş Lügati", which is written in old Anatolian Turkish, served also as a dictionary between Oghuz Turkish, Arabic and Persian. But it is not clear who wrote the dictionary or in which century exactly it was published. It was written in
old Anatolian Turkish from the
Seljuk period and not the late medieval
Ottoman period. In India around 1320,
Amir Khusro compiled the Khaliq-e-bari, which mainly dealt with
Hindustani and
Persian words.'' is an example of an illustrated dictionary.
Arabic dictionaries were compiled between the 8th and 14th centuries, organizing words in rhyme order (by the last syllable), by alphabetical order of the
radicals, or according to the alphabetical order of the first letter (the system used in modern European language dictionaries). The modern system was mainly used in specialist dictionaries, such as those of terms from the
Qur'an and
hadith, while most general use dictionaries, such as the
Lisan al-`Arab (13th century, still the best-known large-scale dictionary of Arabic) and
al-Qamus al-Muhit (14th century) listed words in the alphabetical order of the radicals. The
Qamus al-Muhit is the first handy dictionary in Arabic, which includes only words and their definitions, eliminating the supporting examples used in such dictionaries as the
Lisan and the
Oxford English Dictionary. '' In medieval Europe,
glossaries with equivalents for Latin words in
vernacular or simpler Latin were in use (e.g. the
Leiden Glossary). The
Catholicon (1287) by
Johannes Balbus, a large grammatical work with an alphabetical lexicon, was widely adopted. It served as the basis for several bilingual dictionaries and was one of the earliest books (in 1460) to be printed. In 1502
Ambrogio Calepino's
Dictionarium was published, originally a monolingual Latin dictionary, which over the course of the 16th century was enlarged to become a multilingual glossary. In 1532
Robert Estienne published the
Thesaurus linguae latinae and in 1572 his son
Henri Estienne published the
Thesaurus linguae graecae, which served up to the 19th century as the basis of Greek lexicography. The first monolingual Spanish dictionary written was
Sebastián Covarrubias's
Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, published in 1611 in Madrid, Spain. In 1612 the first edition of the
Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, for
Italian, was published. It served as the model for similar works in French and English. In 1690 in
Rotterdam was published, posthumously, the
Dictionnaire Universel by
Antoine Furetière for
French. In 1694 appeared the first edition of the (still published, with the ninth edition not complete ). Between 1712 and 1721 was published the
Vocabulario portughez e latino written by Raphael Bluteau. The
Royal Spanish Academy published the first edition of the (still published, with a new edition about every decade) in 1780; their
Diccionario de Autoridades, which included quotes taken from literary works, was published in 1726. The
Totius Latinitatis lexicon by
Egidio Forcellini was firstly published in 1777; it has formed the basis of all similar works that have since been published. The first edition of
A Greek-English Lexicon by
Henry George Liddell and
Robert Scott appeared in 1843; this work remained the basic dictionary of Greek until the end of the 20th century. And in 1858 was published the first volume of the
Deutsches Wörterbuch by the
Brothers Grimm; the work was completed in 1961. Between 1861 and 1874 was published the
Dizionario della lingua italiana by
Niccolò Tommaseo. Between 1862 and 1874 was published the six volumes of
A magyar nyelv szótára (Dictionary of Hungarian Language) by Gergely Czuczor and János Fogarasi.
Émile Littré published the between 1863 and 1872. In the same year 1863 appeared the first volume of the
Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal which was completed in 1998. Also in 1863
Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl published the
Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language. The
Duden dictionary dates back to 1880, and is currently the
prescriptive source for the spelling of German. The decision to start work on the
Svenska Akademiens ordbok was taken in 1787.
English dictionaries in Britain The earliest dictionaries in the English language were glossaries of French, Spanish or Latin words along with their definitions in English. The word "dictionary" was invented by an Englishman called
John of Garland in 1220 he had written a book
Dictionarius to help with Latin "diction". An
early non-alphabetical list of 8000 English words was the
Elementarie, created by
Richard Mulcaster in 1582. The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was
A Table Alphabeticall, written by English schoolteacher
Robert Cawdrey in 1604. In 1616, John Bullokar described the history of the dictionary with his "English Expositor".
Glossographia by
Thomas Blount, published in 1656, contains more than 10,000 words along with their etymologies or histories.
Edward Phillips wrote another dictionary in 1658, entitled "
The New World of English Words: Or a General Dictionary" which boldly
plagiarized Blount's work, and the two criticized each other. This created more interest in the dictionaries.
John Wilkins' 1668
essay on philosophical language contains a list of 11,500 words with careful distinctions, compiled by
William Lloyd.
Elisha Coles published his "English Dictionary" in 1676. It was not until
Samuel Johnson's
A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) that a more reliable English dictionary was produced. By this stage, dictionaries had evolved to contain textual references for most words, and were arranged alphabetically, rather than by topic (a previously popular form of arrangement, which meant all animals would be grouped together, etc.). Johnson's masterwork could be judged as the first to bring all these elements together, creating the first "modern" dictionary. was not released until 1928. The OED remains the most comprehensive and trusted English language dictionary to this day, with revisions and updates added by a dedicated team every three months.
American English dictionaries In 1806, American
Noah Webster published his first dictionary,
A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. In 1807 Webster began compiling an expanded and fully comprehensive dictionary,
An American Dictionary of the English Language; it took twenty-seven years to complete. To evaluate the etymology of words, Webster learned twenty-six languages, including
Old English (Anglo-Saxon), German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic, and
Sanskrit. Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris, France, and at the
University of Cambridge. His book contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared in a published dictionary before. As a
spelling reformer, Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex, so his dictionary introduced spellings that became
American English, replacing "colour" with "color", substituting "wagon" for "waggon", and printing "center" instead of "centre". He also added American words, like "skunk" and "squash", which did not appear in British dictionaries. At the age of seventy, Webster published his dictionary in 1828; it sold 2500 copies. In 1840, the second edition was published in two volumes. Webster's dictionary was acquired by G & C Merriam Co. in 1843, after his death, and has since been published in many revised editions.
Merriam-Webster was acquired by
Encyclopedia Britannica in 1964. Controversy over the lack of usage advice in the 1961 ''
Webster's Third New International Dictionary spurred publication of the 1969 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'', the first dictionary to use
corpus linguistics. ==Types==