The first known bilingual dictionaries were created in Ancient Mesopotamia - specifically in Ebla (modern Syria)-with cuneiform tablets displaying Sumerian words and their Akkadian equivalents dating back to 2300 BC. The first dictionary of the Chinese language, the Shuowen Jiezi, was written around 100 CE (although other sources suggest that Chinese scholars may have created a monolingual dictionary as far back as 1109 BC, while a Greek lexicon (specifically a list of words used by Homer, and their meanings) was written by Apollonius the Sophist at around the same time. According to the Chronicles of Japan, Japanese dictionaries originated in 682 CE, although the first dictionary dealt with the deciphering of Chinese characters.
The earliest European dictionaries were bilingual dictionaries. These were glossaries of French, Italian or Latin words, along with definitions of the foreign words in English. An early nonalphabetical list of 8000 English words was the Elementarie created by Richard Mulcaster in 1592.
The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabetically, written by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604. Conversely, it is eight hundred years after the first Arabic, and almost one-thousand years after the first Sanskrit in India. The only surviving copy is found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Yet this early effort, as well as the many imitators which followed it, was seen as unreliable and nowhere near definitive. It wasn't until Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) that a truly noteworthy, reliable English Dictionary was deemed to have been produced, and the fact that today many people still mistakenly believe Johnson to have written the first English Dictionary is a testament to this legacy. By this stage, dictionaries had evolved to contain textual references for most words, and were arranged alphabetically, rather than by topic (a previously popular form of arrangement, which meant all animals would be grouped together etc.). Johnson's masterwork could be judged as the first to bring all these elements together, creating the first 'modern' dictionary.
Johnson's Dictionary remained the English-language standard for over 150 years, until the Oxford University Press began writing and releasing the Oxford English Dictionary in short fascicles from 1884 onwards. It took nearly 50 years to finally complete the huge work, and they finally released the complete OED in 12 volumes in 1928. It remains the most comprehensive and trusted English language dictionary to this day, with revisions and updates added by a dedicated team every three months.
There are many different types of special-purpose dictionaries, including bilingual, multilingual, scientific, historical, biographical, technical and geographical dictionaries.
In the Arab world the most trusted and referred to dictionary is Al-Mawrid, which is created by Muneer Baalbaki in 1967.
