TIMELINE

By Hom
  • 3200 BCE

    The Uruk IVa Wordlists

    670 clay tablets, the earliest monolingual Sumerian wordlists, were used for teaching the cuneiform writing system.
  • Period: 3200 BCE to 9

    A Chronology of Major Events in the History of Lexicology

    This chronology presents a selection of highlights in the world history of the making of lexical dictionaries.
  • 2400 BCE

    bilingual wordlists of Sumerian and Eblaite language

    Clay tablets, earliest known bilingual wordlists, recording Sumerian and Eblaite in cuneiform script.
  • 1700 BCE

    The Ramesseum Onomasticon

    Thematically ordered Egyptian list of nouns, with later versions like the Tebtunis Onomasticon exceptionally including verbs.
  • 1700 BCE

    Sumerian–Akkadian lexical tablets

    Sumerian–Akkadian compilation comprised more than 9,700 entries in cuneiform.
  • 300 BCE

    The first extensive learned collections of glosses of ancient Greek epic and dialect words

    Philitas of Cos and Simias of Rhodes produced these learned collections of dialect words,initiating the Greek lexicographical tradition.
  • 300 BCE

    The Nighaṇṭu

    List of Vedic words is the tradition's earliest extant text, with a commentary (the Nirukta)
  • 200 BCE

    The Erya

    A compilation, thematically-arranged compendium of glosses covering 4,300 characters.
  • 100 BCE

    Beginnings of ancient Latin lexicography

  • 18

    The Fangyan

    Attributed to Yang Xiong, this work glosses regional Chinese varieties and words from other languages.
  • 20

    De verborum significatu

    Compiled by Marcus Verrius Flaccus, this work is now known through a second-century abridgement by Festus, an eighth-century epitome.
  • 100

    Early Tamil Lexicography in the Tolkāppiyam

    120 words are explained within this metrical grammatical text, which may have been compiled gradually between 200 BC and 200 AD.
  • 149

    The Shuowen jiezi

    Xu Shen's work registered 9,353 characters classified by graphic elements,establishing a tradition that extended for centuries, culminating in dictionaries like the 33,179-character Zihui.
  • 500

    The Lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria

    Alphabetic compilation of obscure words, with approximately 51,100 entries, is the oldest Greek dictionary
  • 500

    The Amarakos‌a

    Early Sanskrit lexicon, translations into several Asian languages, and a mention by Roget in 1852.
  • 601

    The Qieyun

    Compiled by Lu Fayan and others, the original work is now known only through later versions like the Jiyun, which registered 53,525 characters.
  • 636

    The Etymologiae

    Thematically arranged work intertwines etymological and encyclopedic information, and survives in nearly a thousand manuscript copies.
  • 670

    The Épinal-Erfurt Glossary

    Some Latin headwords are glossed in Latin and others in Old English
  • 700

    The First Irish–Latin Glossaries

    Sanas Cormaic with 1301 entries, O’Mulconry’s Glossary with 874 entries, and Dúil Dromma Cetta with 643 entries.
  • 1050

    Papias’s Elementarium doctrinae rudimentum

    First Latin monolingual dictionary, alphabetically arranged
  • 1440

    Promptorium Parvulorum

  • Edward Lhuyd’s Archaeologia Britannica

    Early comparative lexicography of Celtic languages.

  • Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language

    Landmark English dictionary, highly influential

  • Rise of historical, quotation-based dictionaries

  • Oxford English Dictionary (first edition)

    Standard for historical lexicography

  • Learners’ dictionaries (e.g. West, Hornby)

    Designed for second-language learners. 1940s–1950s CE

  • Use of electronic corpora in lexicography

  • CD-ROM and digital dictionaries

  • OED Online

    Web dictionaries become primary resource

  • Trésor de la langue française informatisé

  • Historical Thesaurus of the OED

    Publication of the Historical Thesaurus of the OED, ed. Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irene Wotherspoon.