Early dictionaries

It was not until the early seventeenth century that anything we would recognize as a monolingual dictionary could be found for the English language. Dictionaries or glossaries for translating Latin to English date from a century or so earlier, and in the sixteenth century lists of so-called hard words could be found for English, explaining words which largely had been adapted from Latin. The first real dictionary of English is generally acknowledged to be Robert Cawdrey’s (1604) A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words. The tradition of lexicographical piracy goes at least as far back as Cawdrey, who is said to have used an available Latin–English dictionary of his day to help come up with the words to define. The first dictionaries going beyond the tradition of defining only ‘hard’ words to include ordinary, everyday words began to appear in the early eighteenth century; Landau (2001: 52) cites John Kersey’s (1702) A New English Dictionary as the earliest of these, followed by Nathaniel Bailey’s (1721) An Universal Etymological English Dictionary.