First English Monolingual Dictionary
Poet involved
What happened
In 1604, the schoolteacher and Puritan preacher Robert Cawdrey published A Table Alphabeticall in London, generally regarded as the first monolingual dictionary in the English language. This work contained definitions for about 2,500 'hard usual English words', drawn from a variety of sources, and was intended to help readers understand difficult vocabulary. At only 120 pages, it was a modest but groundbreaking work that launched the tradition of English lexicography.
Literary impact
Cawdrey's dictionary made English literature more accessible to a wider audience by providing definitions for difficult words, enabling common readers to engage with the works of poets like Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare. It also reflected the growing interest in standardizing the English language, a concern that would preoccupy poets and scholars throughout the seventeenth century. The Table Alphabeticall set the stage for the more ambitious dictionaries that followed, including Johnson's.
Source: Wikipedia
