An excerpt from Dictionary People investigates the story of amateurs collaborating alongside the academic elite to create a foundation for our vocabulary. Every item on this page was chosen by a Town ...

Noah Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language in 1806. His 1828 follow-up contained 70,000 entries. By 1864, the collection had 114,000 ...

Rastell’s law dictionary was the first English language dictionary of any type, with its alphabetical arrangement of terms and their definitions. First published in Anglo-Norman French around 1523 as ...

It weighs in at nearly six pounds, fills more than 1,000 pages, and represents the work of many hands and hearts. The Klallam people’s first dictionary for what was always an unwritten language was ...

Although they had been doing what was termed as “bread and butter business” in school books, Bibles and the works of legal expert Joseph Chitty, the Merriam’s Main and State streets store really ...