350 Dr. J. A. H. Murray [May 22, 



early dictionaries indulged in divers titles: iho Promjjtorium or store- 

 room, the Catholicon or general manual, the Medulla or marrow 

 of the language, the Hortus Vocabulorum or garden of words, the 

 Alvearie or beehive, the Ahecedarium] or alphabetic (A B C) book, 

 the Table Alphaheiical^ the English Expositor, the World of Words, 

 the GlossograpJiia, the Gazophylacium ; and it would have been im- 

 possible to predict in the sixteenth century that the name Dictionary 

 would supplant all the others, and even rise superior to the better- 

 born word Vocabulary. Dictionaries and vocabularies were not all, 

 at first, in alphabetical order ; the words were more often arranged 

 under subject-headings, so as to bring together all the names of 

 things of the same kind, e.g. things in heaven, things in the air, 

 names of times and seasons, names of beasts, of kindred and relation- 

 ship, of trades, of clothing, of things in the garden, of church 

 furniture, &c. But it was gradually found that for pur])oses of 

 reference, there was nothing so simple as the alphabetical order, 

 although it brings together strange bedfellows, and as the old lady 

 is said to have remarked of the quotations in Johnson's dictionary, 

 though interesting, it is rather disconnected. Since the end of the 

 sixteenth century, therefore, all ordinary dictionaries of European 

 languages have been in A B C order ; and this has so taken hold of 

 the popular mind as to be considered an essential feature of a 

 dictionary, with the curious result of extending the name Dictionary 

 to any book which gives information of any kind in A B C order, 

 although it does not treat of dictiones or words, but of things, persons, 

 places, history, or branches of science. Thus we have in modern use 

 dictionaries of chronology, of geography, of music, of commerce, of 

 manufactures, of London, of the Thames, of Christian antiquities, 

 of national biography. In the etymological and historical sense of 

 the word, these are not dictionaries at all, but Abecedariums, text- 

 books or reference-bocks on their special subject, with their articles 

 arranged in alphabetical order ; modern usage, however, has sanctioned 

 this application of dictionary, and in questions of nomenclature usage 

 has to be accepted. But I assume that in asking me to discourse on 

 "Dictionaries," your Institution expected me to take the word in its 

 strict sense of " books explaining the meaning of words." 



Dictionaries explaining words are, broadly, of two kinds ; those 

 which give the meaning of the words of one tongue in the language 

 of another, as an English Dictionary of Latin, Greek, or French ; and 

 those which deal with the words of their own language, setting forth 

 their current spelling, pronunciation, meaning and use, and sometimes 

 telling more or less of their origin and history. 



Of these two kinds, the former was naturally the earlier; we have 

 been told that even among the brick tablets of ancient Assyria, there 

 exist remains of dictionaries or vocabularies explaining the earlier 

 Sumerian or Accadian in the later language of the country ; we know 

 that vocabularies of Greek words explained in Latin appeared not 

 many centuries after the Christian Era. But on these ancient essays at 



