Lexicographer Isaac Funk on This Day in History

 

This Day in History: American Lutheran minister, editor, lexicographer, publisher, and spelling reformer Isaac K. Funk died on this day in 1912. We know him best for the Funk & Wagnalls Company which gave us the The Standard Dictionary of the English Language. Of course, this dictionary was not the first or the last to be published. The earliest dictionary in the English language was Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604. It lists approximately 3000 words, defining each one with a simple and brief description. It also described itself as being ‘for the benefit of Ladies … or other unskilfull persons’.The oldest known dictionaries were cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian–Akkadian wordlists, discovered in Ebla (modern Syria) and dated to roughly 2300 BCE, the time of the Akkadian Empire. The word "dictionary" was invented by an Englishman called John of Garland in 1220 — he had written a book Dictionarius to help with Latin "diction". The first American dictionary was Noah Webster's, who also gave us a version of the Bible which corrected the King James Bible. He also learned 26 languages to help him write his dictionary. There are also niche dictionaries: "For example, you can find plenty of rhyming dictionaries and reverse dictionaries (that are organized by a theme rather than alphabetized). Scrolling through Wye's Dictionary Of Improbable Words: All-Vowel Words And All-Consonant Words might help you find some uncommon words to win your next Scrabble game. And Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words contains weird English words that have appeared in at least one dictionary in the past. For example, you might learn that junkettaceous means worthless and cuggermugger means whispered gossiping."~Mental Floss

Oh, and the one word in the dictionary that has the most definitions is the word "set." In the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "set" has 430 separate definitions.