Dictionaries!

I was one of those kids in elementary school who liked to read dictionaries. Not all the time, but every once in a while. My family had a big one open on a table in our living room, and I would look up words just for the fun of it (this is, incidentally, how I know the definitions of all the swear words I know, but that is beside the point). And it didn't just stop at Elementary school. I remember going to a party maybe a year ago, and being completely unsociable all evening simply because I found a Chinese character dictionary and just had to look through it and see which ones I could recognize. Just this last summer I discovered a new kind of dictionary--a usage dictionary. These things don't give simple definitions, they explain debates over words that have confused you for your entire life (affect/effect), or grammar "rules" that you learned in Junior High, then promptly forgot because they weren't important (I am firm in claiming my right to end a sentence in a preposition, and fortunately the usage dictionaries back me up).

But dictionaries haven't always been around. China, of course, came up with them about 2000 years before everyone else, but I would like give a brief overview of the history of dictionaries in Europe, and especially dictionaries in English.

This is probably where I should explain that there are two main kinds of dictionaries (usage ones don't count, apparently). The first kind, and probably what you think of first when you hear the word "dictionary," contains words in one language, along with definitions, pronunciation, usage guides, and etymology in that same language. The second kind is also sometimes called a "lexicon," and it contains words in two or more languages (for example, a Spanish-English dictionary, so you can look up what an English word translates to in Spanish).

Interestingly, the second kind actually came first, at least in Europe. The first multilingual dictionary showed up in 1502, and was compiled by a man named Ambrogio Calepino. It was a dictionary of Latin and Italian, but over the next few decades it was expanded to include equivalent words in several different languages. The Gutenberg press had been invented by this time, and this dictionary was reprinted many times during the 1500s. It is interesting that the first dictionary came so soon after the start of printing, since you would think that monks would need to learn Latin even before that, but I suppose this just made it easier to produce something that everyone already needed.

After this there was an outburst of dictionaries, and it is hard to keep track of exactly what was what where. I couldn't find which was the first monolingual dictionary in Europe, but the first monolingual dictionary in English was written in 1604. It is rather a poor approximation of what we think of as a dictionary now, containing only 2,543 words, and only brief definitions. There were several dictionaries like this written, but there wasn't anything particularly wonderful for about the next 150 years. These first English dictionaries only contained "difficult" words, that is, words that not every speaker of the language would know.

In June 1746, a group of publishers commissioned a man named Samuel Johnson to write a dictionary that was actually useful. By this point many people wanted to write and publish because it was relatively, and so they wanted to know the "right way" to spell things and say things. It took Johnson nine years to complete the dictionary. The finished product had around 43,500 words, was massive, and ended up selling for more than he was paid to write the entire thing. It is now considered to be probably the most influential dictionary ever. It is very much like modern dictionaries from what I've seen, but Johnson sometimes inserted his personal opinions and humor into the definitions. Some examples are (courtesy of Wikipedia):

"Excise: a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged not by the common judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid"

"Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words"

"Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people"
"Monsieur: a term of reproach for a Frenchman"

And now we get to a name that you will probably recognize. A little more than 50 years after Samuel Johnson published his definitive his British English dictionary, a man named Noah Webster from the United States published the definitive American English dictionary, containing around 70,000 words. Webster was a previously a school teacher and had very distinctive ideas about how things should be said and spelled. His opinions are a large part of the reason that British and American spellings of certain words are different, such as "theatre/theater," "colour/color," and "judgement/judgment."

With Johnson and Webster, dictionaries became what they are today. Since then there have been, many, many re-printings and new editions of both Webster's and Johnson's dictionaries. The Oxford Dictionary eventually supplanted Johnson's as the premier British dictionary in 1928, but Webster's dictionary, at least, continues to be printed today, although in a much updated form (now called Merriam-Webster's. The name "Webster" by itself is in the common domain and can be used by anyone). Dictionaries have become a standard part of our lives, whether it be for Scrabble, for looking up a word you don't know from your textbook, or just for fun.