Who invented the dictionary??
No one person gets this credit. Samuel Johnson is most often credited with this task, but it’s not true – not even he claimed it to be so. One of the earliest known dictionaries – and it’s still around – was written in Latin and compiled during the reign of Augustus. The Chinese had a dictionary in the third century B.C. In 1604 Robert Cawdrey created the first English language dictionary and in 1656 Thomas Blount also published a dictionary. Johnson didn’t crank his out until 1755. In 1806 the Americans put the British to shame when Noah Webster compiled his dictionary of the English language. It became a best seller and drove the British Philological Society to begin compiling a comprehensive dictionary, which would later become the Oxford English Dictionary. It took more than a century and several different editors to get the thing published in full form. The first edition was actually worked on from 1860 to 1952, though plans went back earlier. The most famous editor was James Murr
