When did dictionaries first appear

A. Word lists date back to at least the first century AD, when a number of lists of Greek words that had gone out of use were produced. By coincidence, at the same time on the other side of the world, the first Chinese dictionary, listing 9,000 characters, was commissioned. There were various lists of Latin words as well as multilingual dictionaries produced throughout the Middle Ages, but the origins of the modern dictionary are to be found in England in the late 16th century. At this time people began to become increasingly aware of the two levels of English - 'learned' or 'literary' as distinct from 'spoken' or 'popular' - to an extent that made it desirable to gloss one in the other's terms.

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Q. To gloss
A. To comment on or explain a word or passage.

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Q. And the first appearance of a dictionary
A. The name comes from the Latin dictio, 'the act of speaking' and dictionarius, 'a collection of words'. Cawdrey's Table Alphabetical of Hard Wordes (1604), containing about 3,000 words, might be called the first English dictionary. Henry Cockeram's English Dictionarie (1623) translated hard words to easy as well as easy to hard. The first major English dictionary was N. Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721), which had more entries than its famous successor, Dr Johnson's Dictionary (1755), which, on publication, set new standards for lexicography and remained the essential reference text for nearly a century.

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Q. And the best
A. The Oxford English Dictionary is, without a doubt, the greatest dictionary of any modern language. A major undertaking, the OED was published in 1933 in thirteen volumes. It was a revised and updated revision of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles that had been published in ten volumes between 1884 and 1928. The aim of the OED is to give a full history of the development of all English words since the 12th century, with full illustrative quotations ordered according to the principal distinct senses of the word. It has been regularly updated by a series of supplements. The possibility of a dictionary organised on synchronic - describing a language as it exists at a given point in time -� rather than historical principles was brought closer when in 1984 the OED files began to be converted into a computerised database.

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Abridged from the OED, the two-volume Shorter Oxford Dictionary - shorter being a relative term here - is more practical for home use and contains everything most people are ever likely to need to know.

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Q. Any other notable English dictionaries
A. The first American dictionary of significance was that of Noah Webster, a New England lawyer and teacher, who was interested in spelling reform. In 1828 Webster produced An American Dictionary of the English Language. The uniqueness of this 70,000 compilation was its abandonment of British spelling for 'simpler' American variations: center (centre) and honor (honour), for example.

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Eventually Webster's dictionaries were purchased by the G.C. Merriam Company, giving them the right to call their publications Webster's dictionaries, but subsequently the name Webster has gone into the public domain and any dictionary company wishing to make its product seem more authoritative appends Webster to the title, making the term somewhat diminished in authority.

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In 1963 the Merriam Company introduced a revised edition, called Webster's Third New International Dictionary. What was unique about this version was it was based on linguistic principles, setting out to describe the language as it actually exists, rather than acting as a policeman or legislator of language as had Johnson back in the 1750s. The immediate impact of this new approach was that slang words, swear words and 'incorrect' words were admitted to the dictionary. This principle is now used in all major revisions of all dictionaries, including the OED.

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By Simon Smith