Page:Evolution of English Lexicography.djvu/20

Rh become a household word to students of the history of English, is a vocabulary containing some 10,000 words—substantives, adjectives, and verbs—with their Latin equivalents, which, as edited by Mr. Albert Way for the Camden Society in 1865, makes a goodly volume. Many manuscript copies of it were made and circulated, of which six or seven are known to be still in existence, and after the introduction of printing it passed through many editions in the presses of Pynson, Wynkyn de Worde, and Julian Notary.

Later in the same century, the year 1483 saw the compilation of a similar, but quite independent work, which its author named the Catholicon Anglicum, that is, the English Catholicon or Universal treatise, after the name of the celebrated Latin dictionary of the Middle Ages, the Catholicon or Summa of Johannes de Balbis, or John of Genoa, made in 1286. The English Catholicon was in itself a work almost equally valuable with the Promptorium; but it appears never to have attained to the currency of the Promptorium, which appeared as a printed book in 1499, while the Catholicon remained in two MSS. till printed for the Early English Text Society in 1881.

The Renascence of Ancient Learning had now reached England, and during the sixteenth century there were compiled and published many important Latin-English and English-Latin vocabularies and dictionaries. Among these special mention must be made of the Dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot, Knight, the first work, so far as I know, which took to itself in English what was destined to be the famous name