I see that Google has now jumped into the dictionary game.

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Well I guess Google have been in the dictionary game for a long time but now they’ve formalized it with google.com/dictionary.

The site has a very unembellished look to it but I’d guess it has other online dictionaries looking over their shoulders.

Anyway that’s what got me onto the etymology of dictionary for this episode.

The first reference we have to the word dictionary appears in 1526 and that begs the question as to what people called dictionaries before that, and even if they had dictionaries before that.

Let’s start with the basics.

What is a dictionary but a list of words explained?

The earliest form of explained words were English scribblings in Latin holy books. These were called glosses and when brought together in a list were called glossaries; a word that shows up in 1380.

These are a good starting point for talking about dictionaries because the first English dictionaries were not English dictionaries as you’d think of them, but instead bilingual dictionaries meant to enable English speakers to better understand Latin or French or Italian.

There were a number of innovations that had to happen before dictionaries as we know them came about. For instance listing words in alphabetical order didn’t occur to dictionary makers for quite a while.

Even now what a dictionary actually is is changing.

Only about 100 years ago Ambrose Bierce defined a dictionary as “a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.”

People today often still have a sense that if it isn’t in “the dictionary” it isn’t a real word.

And now, at last, the etymology of dictionary.

As long as it’s been in English dictionary has meant a book dealing with individual words. There had been a medieval Latin word dictionarium meaning a “repertory of words or phrases” built in turn on the Latin dictionem which gave us the English word diction; both of these words meaning how you say something.

But the Latin verb dicere didn’t at first mean “utter” or “say” but instead meant to “point out.” This is the same root that gives us the word indicate.

The Google dictionary doesn’t seem to have etymologies yet and I’ve found some words it doesn’t have either. So it just isn’t true that a word isn’t real if it isn’t in “the dictionary.”