Origin Of Dictionary

Origin Of Dictionary

From the time a baby learned how to utter the first usual word 'mama', his/her quest for learning its definition also starts. Why 'mama'? Rattling mother of course has to explain this word to her lovely baby. Worst was that during that time without dictionary, the growing up baby's many questions sometime forgotten. Lol! 

Oh yeah, many of us always refer meanings of the words to the dictionary. In schooldays, I always brought with me that pocket dictionary. That small book of word meaning reference helped me a lot during my classess especially in English subject. But how this dictionay came to my hand...or its origin was not given an importance. Of course to know its history adds an excitement and value of the dictionary.

Here we go!

Origin from Ancient Time:

The oldest known dictionaries were Akkadian empire cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian–Akkadian wordlists, discovered in Ebla (modern Syria) and dated roughly 2300 BCE. The early 2nd millennium BCE Urra=hubullu glossary is the canonical Babylonian version of such bilingual Sumerian wordlists. A Chinese dictionary, the ca. 3rd century BCE Erya, was the earliest surviving monolingual dictionary, although some sources cite the ca. 800 BCE Shizhoupian as a "dictionary", modern scholarship considers it a calligraphic compendium of Chinese characters from Zhou dynasty bronzes. Philitas of Cos (fl. 4th century BCE) wrote a pioneering vocabulary Disorderly Words (Ἄτακτοι γλῶσσαι,