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The schoolmaster Elisha Coles published a long list of textbooks, turning to dictionaries only in the last five years of his short life. His English Dictionary contained more entries than any comparable dictionary to date—nearly 25,700. He defended…

The English Civil Wars drove Skinner overseas, where he studied medicine. Upon returning, he became a physician in Lincoln and embarked on lexicography. While most dictionaries of his day contained only superficial etymologies, Skinner lavished…

Privileged? Edward Phillips was tutored by his uncle John Milton. The New World of English Words defined 11,000 words, but it wasn’t as new as its title page promised: Thomas Blount wailed publicly that Phillips’s book was “extracted almost wholly…

A lawyer precluded from practice by his Catholicism, Blount wrote the most scholarly general dictionary to date. Innovations include consistently citing authorities and registering etymologies, which he also did in his well-regarded law dictionary.…

The first entirely English wordbook to use dictionary in its title was published in the same year as Shakespeare’s First Folio. In his preface, Cockeram was unabashedly proud: “What any before me in this kinde have begun, I have not onely fully…

Remember Minsheu (first case), with his connections to the Spanish Armada? This Guide into Tongues was the first multilingual dictionary with English headwords, surveying 11 languages. To help him, Minsheu employed native speakers of many languages.…

In his Expositor, Bullokar borrowed from various sources, including Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, which led to accusations of plagiarism. But he advanced the category of hard-word dictionaries that would dominate the 17th century. He nearly doubled…

The title page of the first ecclesiastical dictionary in English promises a dictionary “to increase Christian knowledge”: if the way to salvation is through the Bible, the way to the Bible might be through a dictionary.  Combining lexical information…

Although Cowell’s Interpreter appeared just three years after Cawdrey’s book, its entries are maturely developed. Cowell defined copiously, gave alternative spellings, cited and quoted authorities, distinguished near-synonyms, and provided…

There had already been bilingual dictionaries and subject-specific dictionaries, but no work before Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall covered words from across the whole language, having both headwords and definitions in English.  The book defines about…