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An Early History of Dictionaries

Fixing Language

Amarakosah : Vol. 1 Volume Vol. 1 (by Amarasimha)
Amarakosah : Vol. 2 Volume Vol. 2 (by Amarasimha)
The Nâmalingânusâsana (Amarakosha) of Am... (by Amarasimha)
Lisan Al-'Arab Volume: 15-16 (by Ibn Manr, Muammad Ibn Mukarram, 1232-1311 or 12)
Earlier poems, incl. the translations by...
Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana, O Españo... (by Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián De)

Language evolves. No one disputes that. However, words carry meaning and common understanding requires that meaning be commonly agreed upon.

The word dictionary itself did not exist until 1220, when English grammarian Johannes de Garlandia wrote a book titled Dictionarius to help with learning Latin. However, the English cannot claim preeminence in attempts to standardize and codify language. That honor belongs to Akkadian Empire, which produced cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian word lists as early as 2300 B.C.

In the 4th century B.C. in Greece, Philitas of Cos wrote Disorderly Words to define rare Homeric words and colloquialisms. Also in the 4th century B.C. on the Indian subcontinent, Amarasimha, a Gupta king, wrote the Amarakośa (volume 1 and volume 2) also known as the Nâmalingânusâsana, the first Sanskrit dictionary. It listed approximately 10,000 words.

A century later, the Eastern Zhou Dynasty in China produced the Middle Kingdom’s first dictionary, called Erya. In the 1st century B.C., another Greek scholar Apollonius the Sophist who taught in Rome produced another Homeric lexicon.

Two hundred years later in the 1st century A.D., the Japanese produced two dictionaries, both glossaries of Chinese characters: the Niina (682) of which no copies remain and the Tenrei banshō myōgi (835). In the 9th century A.D., the Frahang-i Pahlavig listed Aramaic heterograms translated into Sassanian, the precursor of Modern Persian. Arab speaking peoples compiled dictionaries from the 8th to the 14th centuries A.D., which organized words in rhyme order. These included terms from the Quran, hadith, and Lisan al-Arab (1232 -1312) Back in Europe during that time, the Irish produced the Sanas Cormaic, which contained over 1,400 Irish words and definitions. Cormac mac Cuilennáin, both a king and bishop, produced the first and shortest volume in the 9th century. Back on the Indian subcontinent in 1320, Amir Khusrow wrote the Khaliq-e-bari which codified and defined Hindustani and Persian words.

During the Middle Ages in Europe, Latin reigned as the scholarly language, so attempts to codify and define language focused on that. In 1287, Johannes Balbus published the Catholicon, which was was of the first books to enjoy widespread circulation in 1460 via that newfangled inventions, the printing press. It served as the precursor for Italian lexicographer Ambrogio Calepino’s Dictionarium, first published in 1502, reprinted repeatedly, and translated into seven languages by Jacopo Facciolati in 1718.

In the late 16th century, Richard Mulcaster codified the meaning of English vocabulary by creating the first English dictionary. Considered the founder of English language lexicography, he included his dictionary, titled Elementarie (1582), in his effort to establish a rigorous curriculum and set a high standard for education in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. It concludes with a list of 8,000 “hard words” in no particular order for which he attempted to establish standardized spelling conventions. In 1604, Robert Cawdrey built upon Mulcaster’s effort by publishing Table Alphabeticall by arranging the included words in alphabetical order and assigning definitions to them.

The Spanish claim the first monolingual dictionary published in Europe: the Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana, O Española (1611) by Sebastián Covarrubias Orozco. The Italians soon followed with the first edition of Vocabolario dell'Accademia della Crusca (1612) and served as the model for subsequent efforts in English and French. Further efforts refined and evolved dictionaries into the standard formats familiar today. The rest, as they say, is history.

By Karen M. Smith