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These approximately 670 clay tablets represent the earliest monolingual Sumerian wordlists and were used for teaching the cuneiform writing system. -
This chronology presents a selection of highlights in the world history of the making of lexical dictionaries. Beyond giving a sense of when some of the oldest lexicographical traditions began, it pays particular attention to the western European languages and, within them, to English.
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These clay tablets from the city's archives represent the earliest known bilingual wordlists, recording Sumerian and Eblaite in cuneiform script. -
This Sumerian–Akkadian compilation comprised more than 9,700 entries in cuneiform,taking its name from the first entry meaning 'interest-bearing debt'. -
This thematically ordered Egyptian list of nouns initiated a tradition lasting two millennia,with later versions like the Tebtunis Onomasticon exceptionally including verbs. -
This list of Vedic words is the tradition's earliest extant text,with a commentary (the Nirukta) dating from no later than the third century BC.
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Philitas of Cos and Simias of Rhodes produced these learned collections of dialect words,initiating the Greek lexicographical tradition, though their work survives only in fragments. -
Its compilation resulted in a thematically-arranged compendium of glosses covering 4,300 characters,which established a long tradition of successors. -
This field traces back to works like the lost Liber glossematorum by Lucius Ateius Philologus.
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Attributed to Yang Xiong, this work glosses regional Chinese varieties and words from other languages, making it arguably the earliest dialect dictionary in any tradition.
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Compiled by Marcus Verrius Flaccus, this work is now known through a second-century abridgement by Festus, which itself survives in fragments and an eighth-century epitome. -
Approximately 120 words are explained within this metrical grammatical text, which may have been compiled gradually between 200 BC and 200 AD. -
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. -
This alphabetic compilation of obscure words, with approximately 51,100 entries, is the oldest Greek dictionary to survive in near-original form. -
This thematically arranged metrical dictionary became the most famous early Sanskrit lexicon, inspiring over eighty commentaries, translations into several Asian languages, and a mention by Roget in 1852.
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Compiled by Lu Fayan and others, the original work is now known only through later versions like the Jiyun, which registered 53,525 characters. -
This thematically arranged work intertwines etymological and encyclopedic information, and survives in nearly a thousand manuscript copies.
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In this work, some Latin headwords are glossed in Latin and others in Old English, making it the oldest surviving document in the history of English lexicography. -
Key early examples include Sanas Cormaic with 1301 entries, O’Mulconry’s Glossary with 874 entries, and Dúil Dromma Cetta with 643 entries.