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17th Century Dictionaries, part one

© Sandra Linville

In 1474, when William Caxton set up England’s first printing press, he started a revolution in England, which spurred the literacy of its citizens. By the beginning of the 17th century, almost half the population enjoyed minimal literacy. During the Renaissance, between 10,000 and 12,000 new words were added to the English language.

Shakespeare, a ‘man of fire-new words,’ filled his world with words. Shakespeare wrote with a vocabulary of some 30,000 words. Today, an educated person’s vocabulary is perhaps about 15,000. English words were everywhere.

However, people didn’t take too much time accurately defining words or didn’t seem to recognize the meaning of words as fixed. Words named things and dictionaries explained words with synonyms or in another language (translations). According to Ian Lancashire, Dept. of English, University of Toronto, fuzzy language abounded until the late 17th century. Until then, English dictionaries were normally "bilingual," either in translating non-English words to English or in replacing hard, often Latinate English, so-called "ink-horn" terms, with easier common English with synonyms.

It wasn’t until the 18th century that Dr. Samuel Johnson would publish his landmark English dictionary. However, his predecessors paved the way.

Sir Thomas Elyot introduced the word 'dictionary' in 1538 in his Latin-English bilingual dictionary. Before the century’s end, more than a dozen bilingual works for French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, and Welsh were published. In 1604, Robert Cawdrey published A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true vvriting, and vnderstanding of hard vsuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French. &c. With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons. This former schoolmaster had produced what is generally considered to be the first monolingual dictionary in English.

A small book of some 120 pages, it focused on scholarly words and it helped those who wished to promote an image of fine learning. The first edition contained 2,543 headwords with concise definitions, usually synonyms, and he indicated those words thought to be of French or Greek origin. Cawdrey added words to each of three later editions in 1609, 1613, 1617. He eventually defined more than 3,200 words, in the same way. Although this reference book appears small and inconsequential compared to modern dictionaries, the Table was the largest dictionary of its type at the time. It also was a link from word lists and glossaries to the dictionaries of today.

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