Branches of linguistics. Synchronic vs diachronic approaches to the language study. Lexicology – ‘the science of the word’ Lexicon

Basic Notions of Lexicography

Dictionary (Lat. dictionarium ‘collection of words and phrases’ < L. dictio ‘word’) is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another.

First dictionaries appeared in 2300 BC in the Akkadian Empire. The earliest modern European dictionaries were bilingual. The earliest in the English language were glossaries of French, Italian or Latin words along with definitions of the foreign words in English.

The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was written by the English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604 – A table alphabeticall conteyning and teaching the true writing, and vnderstanding of hard vsuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French, &c. It was a 120-page volume explaining about 3,000 words. Yet this early effort, as well as the many imitators which followed it, was seen as unreliable and nowhere near definite.