Jim Alden, age 10, of Albuquerque, N.M., for his question:
WHO WROTE THE FIRST DICTIONARY?
An English schoolmaster named Robert Cawdrey prepared the first English language dictionary. His book, "The Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words," was published in 1604 and contained definitions of 30,000 words that had been adopted from other languages.
Before that, ancient Greeks and Romans were the first dictionary writers. The first of these were made up of lists of rare and difficult words or specialized lists of words.
The word dictionary comes from the medieval Latin word dictionarium, which in turn comes from the Latin dictio, which means "saying."
As Latin began to lose ground to English, French, German and other European languages during the Middle Ages, scholars started to rely on glossaries to understand Latin manuscripts. The glossaries usually defined difficult Latin words in the words of the national language.
In 1721, Nathan Bailey published a dictionary containing about 60,000 words. This was the first English dictionary that tried to include all English words instead of just the hard ones.
English literary scholar Samuel Johnson undertook the task of preparing an English dictionary that would set the standard for good usage. His great work, "A Dictionary of the English Language," was published in 1755.
Johnson's dictionary, along with one called "Critical and Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language" published in 1791 by John Walker, served as the standard for information about English words until the middle of the 1800s.
An American, Noah Webster, published a small school dictionary in 1806. This book set an American standard of good usage.
With encouragement from Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and other American leaders, Webster later published a dictionary containing 70,000 entries.
Since it was first published, Webster's dictionary has been frequently revised. It is still widely used today.
The first scholarly dictionary was "A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles." It appeared one part at a time from 1884 until 1928 and had almost 415,000 entries. In 1933, it was published in 12 volumes, with a one volume supplement called the "Oxford English Dictionary."
Many scholars today say that the "Oxford English Dictionary" surpasses all others in its authority and wealth of historical detail.
Probably the most complete modern dictionary is "Webster's Third
New International Dictionary," which holds about 450,000 entries.