Carmen Webster, age 8, of Orlando, Fla., for her question:
WHO WROTE THE FIRST DICTIONARY?
An English schoolmaster named Robert Cawdrey prepared the first dictionary using the English language. His book, called "The Table Alphabetical of Hard Words," was published in 1604 and contained definitions of 3,000 words that had been taken from other languages.
Before that, ancient Greeks and Romans were the first to produce dictionaries. The first ones 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 came from the Latin dictio, meaning saying.
As Latin began to lose ground to English, French, German and other national languages of Europe during the Middle Ages, scholars started to rely on glossaries to understand Latin manuscripts. The glossaries usually gave the meaning of hard Latin words in the words of the national language.
In 1721, a man named 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 hard words only.
English literary scholar Samuel Johnson undertook the task of preparing an English dictionary that would set the standard for good usage in English. He published his great work in 1755. His book was called "A Dictionary of the English Language."
Johnson's dictionary, along with one called "Critical and Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language" and published in 1791 by John Walker, served as the standard for information about English words until the middle of the 1800s.
A man named Noah Webster published a small school dictionary in the United States in 1806. This book set up an American standard of good usage to compare with the British standard set by Johnson and Walker.
After receiving encouragement from Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and other American leaders, Webster came up later with a dictionary containing 70,000 entries. Since then, 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 in parts from 1884 until 1928 and had almost 415,000 entries. In 1933 it was published in 12 volumes, with a one volume supplement called "Oxford English Dictionary."
Scholars say that the "Oxford English Dictionary" cannot be approached by any other dictionary in its wealth and authority of historical detail.
Probably today's most complete modern dictionary is the "Webster's Third New International Dictionary" which holds about 450,000 entries.