The First English Dictionary

The current New York Review has an interesting essay (subs. only) about English-speakers' ongoing efforts to corral their language into a dictionary, and how this job is made more difficult by "more than a billion English-speakers, many engaged in a ceaseless global conversation."

Among many types of wordbooks--"dictionaries of plants and flavors, politics and numismatics, zoology and psychopathology; wordbooks for consultation, exam study, and game playing; collections of euphemisms, profanity, slang, and cant; a dictionary of terrorism and a dictionary of drinking water"--the essay discusses what is believed to be the first English dictionary, 2,500 entries long and published in 1604:

The birth of the genre in English can be dated exactly. It came in the age of Shakespeare, in 1604, when Robert Cawdrey, a schoolmaster and defrocked priest, published a short book with a long title that began A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes.... Cawdrey's dictionary (a word he apparently didn't know) runs to 2,500 words. His definitions are terse, and they don't drip with confidence or erudition. . . .

If he doesn't know something, he has nowhere to look it up. He does have the honor of inventing the perfectly useless circular definition:

gentile, a heathen.

heathen, see Gentile.

An edition of this dictionary was published by Oxford University Press in 2007.

The essay makes the interesting point that Cawdrey's dictionary essentially introduced the idea of alphabetization as a way for ordering information, and now, 400 years hence, computerization, especially computer search, is beginning to erode alphabetization as the de facto primary means of organizing information.