-
The first period (7-16 c.) got the name “glossarization”, that is a period of primitive hand-written bilingual glossaries. Glossaries are lists of incomprehensible foreign words accompanied with the English translation. Such a sign got the name “gloss”. Later, a longer list of words was created by uniting glosses in the whole which was named “glossary”
-
The Promptorium parvulorum (Latin: "Storehouse for children") is an English-Latin bilingual dictionary that was completed about 1440 AD. It was the first English-to-Latin dictionary. It occupies about 300 printed book pages. Its authorship is attributed to Geoffrey the Grammarian, a friar who lived in Lynn, Norfolk, England. -
Medulla Grammaticae ("the Marrow of Grammar") is a collection of fifteenth century Latin–Middle English glossaries in the British Museum and elsewhere.
-
The dictionary Ortus Vocabulorum was published in London in 1500 and containing twice as many words as Promptuarium. A feature that distinguishes this dictionary from earlier ones is that, although its articles consist of Latin words and their brief English translations, an interpretation in English is added to them from time to time. Ortus Vocabulorum is considered to be the first Latin-English dictionary printed in England. -
The Manipulus Vocabulorum is an English-to-Latin dictionary that was produced in the 16th century; it is the first English rhyming dictionary. The Manipulus Vocabulorum was published by Peter Levens in 1570. -
The second period in the English language lexicography can be defined as the period of “dictionaries of difficult words” (17 – early 18 c). Dictionaries of this period are distinguished by their compilers’ tendency to embrace only those lexical units which they considered to be difficult for comprehension while everyday words were either ignored or too shortly defined, hardly differing from each other.
-
A Table Alphabeticall is the abbreviated title of the first monolingual dictionary in the English language, created by Robert Cawdrey and first published in London in 1604.
The title page of the third edition of Table Alphabeticall.
Although the work is important in being the first collection of its kind, it is not a large work. At only 120 pages, it listed a total of 2,543 words accompanied by very brief definitions. In most cases, it was little more than a list of synonyms -
An English Expositor: teaching the interpretation of the hardest words used in our language, with sundry explications, descriptions and discourses is a dictionary of hard words compiled by John Bullokar and first published in London in 1616. The book is significant as the second monolingual dictionary to be printed in the English language. -
In 1623, Henry Cockeram published a dictionary called The English Dictionarie or a New Interpreter of hard English words. It is noteworthy that this was the first explanatory dictionary of the English language, in the name of which the word dictionary was used. -
Glossographia, published in 1656, is one of the dictionaries of "difficult words" from this period. Its author was Thomas Blount. He was the first English lexicographer to systematically indicate the etymologies of words included in his dictionary, despite the fact that many of the etymologies were inaccurate. -
Edward Phillips, the compiler of this dictionary, The New World of English Words, published in 1658 Most of the interpretations were borrowed from other lexicographers. The definitions that he made himself were inaccurate
-
“Pre-scientific or prescriptive” period (18 – early 19 c). The lexicographer established the language norm, set authoritative standards for spelling, pronunciation and usage and “corrected”, following the word etymology, analogy and rationalism. Lexicographers tried to give exhaustive information about the word, aimed at recommending the reader how to use, pronounce and write this or that word, that’s why nearly all dictionaries of this period can be characterized as normative.
-
An Universal Etymological English Dictionary was a dictionary compiled by Nathan Bailey and first published in London in 1721. Although Bailey put the word "etymological" in his title, he gives definitions for many words without also trying to give the word's etymology – because he doesn't know what the etymology is. A very high percentage of the etymologies he does give are consistent with what's in today's English dictionaries. -
Published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language. -
The chief contributions of the 19th were unmistakably the recording of word history through dated quotations and the development on encyclopedic word books.
At the fourth stage of development of the English national lexicography, the dictionary of Johnson was significantly revised, supplemented and edited by G. Todd, who published his lexicographical work in 1818. The microstructure of the dictionary has become universal for all explanatory dictionaries. -
In 1828, at the age of 70, Webster published his "American Dictionary of the English Language" (ADEL) in two volumes, which included 70,000 articles, in contrast to all previously published dictionaries, each of which contained no more than 58,000 articles. -
In 1837, the Charles Richardson dictionary was published in England – A New Dictionary of the English Language, which embodied a new, "historical" approach to compiling dictionaries. According to Richardson, the main task of lexicography is to trace the path of word development in reverse order and find its original meaning. Thus, the Richardson dictionary is to some extent a prototype of etymological dictionaries. -
The Oxford English Dictionary is the largest lexicographic project of the 19th and 20th centuries. Work on it began, under the auspices of the Royal philological society, in 1857, the first volume was published in 1888, and the last in 1933. The dictionary's editor is sir James Murray. -
The Collins English Dictionary is a printed and online dictionary of English. It is published by HarperCollins in Glasgow. The edition of the dictionary in 1979 with Patrick Hanks as editor and Laurence Urdang as editorial director, was the first British to typeset from output from a computer database in a specified format. This meant that every aspect of an entry was handled by a different editor using different forms or templates.