The British Library and Dictionaries

The British Library, an organisationestablished by the British Parliament in 1972 - and which incorporated the British Library Museum - has an interesting section on the history of British dictionaries (http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/dic/meanings.html).

William Caxton, first English printer

There you can learn that the first initialattempt at production of an English dictionary came in 1582, with Mulcaster's Elementarie, an 8,000 word list (with no definitions, albeit), in an attempt to start organising the English language and show that no 'language, be it whatsoever, is better able toutter all arguments, either with more pith, or greater planesse, than ourEnglish tung is, if the English utterer be as skillfull in the matter, which heis to utter.’

The Elementarie was produced only about one hundred years after William Caxton took the first printing device to England (in the late 15th Century) and the spelling of the English language, which has never been controlled by the government, was still not greatly consolidated.

You may also learn about later developments, like Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall (of 1604, described further herein), the 1879 to 1928 Oxford English Dictionary and reaching the 2002 Online Oxford English Dictionary, among many others. On the British Library site, readers may view the title page and specific pages within these books.