Ive always wondered how dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesaurus’, went about being created.
How do they know theyve not missed a word to define, or a subject to cover?
When was the first dictionary made and by who?
Nowadays i am sure it is easy to re-create them because so many of them are already made, and people can just review another dict/ency/thes to re-create it or add to it.
And i am assuming thats how its always been, newer versions just keep releasing.
Wouldn’t plagairism come into effect? Ive never seen the definition of a word cited.
Is there a title for those who look for and research words and definitions?
The general word for the creation of dictionaries is lexicography, and you can search on it to find a lot of information.
The very short version is that dictionary editors solicit actual uses of words from a small army of volunteer compilers who go through books of every period for examples. Literally millions of words in their original contexts are amassed and examined by the editors to refine them down to a few basic definitions. The definitions are also written by the editors, who consult previous dictionaries so that they stay more or less constant over the years. If you read all the major dictionaries out there you’ll soon see that definitions are borrowed and adapted freely.
Dictionaries developed out of alphabetical tables of difficult words. Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall from 1604 is often cited as the first in English, although you can find others depending on how you define the word dictionary.
Encyclopedias are written by asking experts in their fields to contribute articles. Thesauruses were originally compiled by obsessed individuals like Roget, but now are done by teams of editors like anything else.
This subject has been a hot one in publishing for the last few years. Most of the books cover the Oxford English Dictionary and the amazing 40+ year odyssey it was to get the first edition finished. All subsequent dictionaries use a variant on the same process so this will shed light on them all.
Encyclopedias have a much less easily identified history. In one sense, there appear to have been encyclopedias for as long as people have compiled books. The idea of gathering all the information available on any topic (or on a collection of topics) and recording it for posterity appears to occur to everyone who grasps the nature of writing. The word encyclopedia did not become popular for this type of work until Diderot’s magnificent Encyclopédie made it the byword for such efforts. (Many early encyclopedias were called dictionaries.)
Thesaurus comes from an Italian word meaning “treasure” and originally meant a “treasure” of knowledge which might be either a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or some other serious reference work. It took on the meaning of a list of synonyms when Peter Mark Roget produced his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases in 1852, in which he organized a large number of words according to their relations to each other and provided an index to find them under the appropriate grouping. His work was so well developed that the word became associated with “dictionary of synonyms” and remains the only one-word descriptor of those works, today.
By the late 16th century, a number of books had been produced in English with an eye toward normalizing spelling. They were generally produced without definitions, but they were organized along the principles of one or another person’s idea of how best to spell English words. In 1596, Edmund Coote produced a work intended to be used to instruct children in the methods of reading and writing. It included 1,400 (or so) words arranged according to etymology.
In 1604, Robert Cawdrey produced a work that was devoted solely to listing English words and their meanings. He, thus, gets the honor of having produced the “first English dictionary,” although his work is actually a plagiarized compilation of (most of) the word list from Coote’s grammar along with a list of meanings taken from a Latin-English dictionary plus a word list taken from an English translation of a Latin medical work in which the “hard” words (usually invented words–the book’s author was Dutch and he had some trouble remembering his English medical terms–had been listed with simpler synonyms. Cawdrey did, however, get the number of words listed up to 3,000.
After a number of progressively better works, Samuel Johnson was the first to produce a dictionary following the method noted by Exapno Mapcase (although he did nearly all his own research, dictating to a group of copyists as he read). The use of such phrases preceded Johnson, but his innovation was to note differences of usage for the same word and to illustrate each of those meanings by a phrase. He also relied heavily on etymologies and developments in the understanding of language development that were then beginning to be published.