1903.] Dr. J. A. H. Murray on Dictionaries. 349 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 

 Friday, May 22, 1 903. 



Sir James Crichton-Browne, M.D. LL.D. F.R.S., 



Treasurer and Vice-President, in the Chair. 



J. A. H. Murray, Esq., M.A. LL.D. D.C.L. D.Litt. Ph.D. 



Dictionaries. 



The subject on wliich I Lave been asked to discourse this evening is 

 that of " Dictionaries." I have met people who knew nothing about 

 Dictionaries ; they knew only that there was a book called " The 

 Dictionary," just as there is a book called the Bible, another called 

 the Prayer-book, another the Koran ; when they saw or heard a word 

 that was new to them, they wondered if it was "in the Dictionary," 

 just as they might wonder whetlier a particular text was in the Bible, 

 or a particular person's name in Who's Who. Like these other books, 

 the dictionary might be in different types or in different bindings, but 

 it was still an individualised work — The Dictionary. That there are 

 dictionaries and dictionaries, or that, sad to say, dictionaries differ, 

 had not yet dawned upon their apprehension. But of late years the 

 merits and excellencies of rival dictionaries have been thundered 

 upon us by daily papers from The Times downward, so loudly and so 

 long, that the number of these ingenuous people must be greatly 

 diminished. At any rate, your Institution, in asking me to discourse 

 upon " Dictionaries," has recognised at once their plurality and their 

 variety. 



The singular of " Dictionaries " is a Dictionary ; what is a dic- 

 tionary ? The term is formed from the Latin dictio^ a word originally 

 meaning saying or speaJcing ; but already by the later Latin Gram- 

 marians used in the sense of verbum or vocahulum, a word, whence we 

 have the originally synonymous term vocabulary. A Dictionary then 

 is a repertory of dictiones or words. The Latiu form, Dictionarium 

 or Dictionarius, does not occur in ancient Latin ; so far as I know 

 it was farmed, or at least first used, in 1225, by an Englishman, 

 Johannes de Garlanda, or John of Garland, as the title of a collection 

 of Latin vocables, arranged according to their subjects, in sentences, 

 for the use of learners. About a century later, Peter Berchorius, 

 who died at Paris in 1362, made a Dictionarium morale utriusque 

 Testamenti, or Moral Dictionary of the Old and New Testament, 

 consisting of Moralisatiuns on the principal words of the Vulgate, 

 for the use of students in theology. The first to use " Dictionary " as 

 an English word in its modern sense, was apjjarently Sir Thomas 

 Elyot in the title of his Latin-English Dictionary of 1538. The 



