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English monks produced glosses based on interlinear translations from Latin. 'Leiden Glossary' is one of the first glossaries
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It took seven centuries to achieve fully alphabetical order in glossaries -
During this period, glossaries were bilingual and differentiated by vocabulary. The task for the authors was to explain incomprehensible(or 'hard') words
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"Medulla Gramatice"— the first Latin-English dictionary which appeared in the 15th century. Later on "Medulla Gramatice" served the basis for the first printed bilingual dictionary "Ortus (Hortus) Voca-bulorum". -
The structure of the entry became fairly complex and the reader could extract more and more information about the lexis of the target language. Lexicographers commented on the morphological structure of the word (derivational affixes were singled out in 1538), its origin and field of usage, took into account synonymy and dialectal differences, used different modes of definition, examples, usage notes and even illustrations to make their dictionaries user-friendly. -
Latin began to lose its status of an international language and English lexicographers turned to new West-European languages.
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"Alvearic or Tripple Dictionarie, English, Latin, French" by J. Baret -
"A Dictionarie French and English" by Claudius Hollyband -
'A World of Words, or Most copious, and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English' by John Florio -
This period is the time of creation of English dictionaries.
Robert Cawdrey's the most famous lexicographer of this period.
The task of the dictionary compilers was to include words in dictionaries that would fall into the literary language -
"A Table Alphabetical, containing and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard English words, borrowed from Hebrew, Greek, Latin or French, etc." by Robert Cawdrey -
"Glossagraphia: or a Dictionary, Interpreting all such Hard Words whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonik, Belgich, British or Saxon; as are now used in our refined English Tongue. Also the Terms of Divinity,Law,Physics, Mathematics... with Etymologies, Definitions, and Historical Observations on the same" by Thomas Blount -
The period of the beginning of Modern English Dictionary Practice
The creation of monolingual dictionaries. Nathan Bailey was the first lexicographer who made orthoepic notes to words
The academic Dictionary of Samuel Johnson is considered the most advanced dictionary of that time The appearance of encyclopedic and etymological dictionaries -
The first attempt at a dictionary whose word-list comprised words of different degrees of complexity, both native and non-native was made by Nathaniel Bailey in 1721.
Nathaniel Bailey's dictionary is the most important achievement of English monolingual lexicography before Samuel Johnson's Dictionary. -
About 114,000 examples used in the Dictionary perform the following important functions: a) they prove that the word is not a fiction of the lexicographer's brain but a fact of language; b) they reinforce sense distinctions; c) they help the user to gain a deeper insight into the collocational, colligational and stylistic peculiarities of the headword; d) they point to the chronological limits of the language period under discussion. -
During this period, Johnson's dictionary is still the benchmark, but it was adapted by Henry Todd.
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In 1837, Charles Richardson's dictionary was published in England, embodying a new, "historical" approach to compiling dictionaries. This dictionary is interesting for some theoretical problems that were put forward by the author in the preface. According to Richardson, the main task of lexicography is to trace the path of development of a word in reverse order and find its original meaning.
Thus, Richardson's dictionary is a prototype of etymological dictionaries. -
The OED is the most comprehensive and authoritative dictionary of the English language. It was compiled by the English Philological Society. The work began in 1857, the first volume was published in 1888, the last one — in 1928, and a Supplement — in 1933. The second edition of the OED which recorded the language of the 20th century was published in 1989. Now the OED consists of twenty volumes and the number of entries amounts to more than 325,000.