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districts, of towns and of villages, of castles, monasteries and other
buildings. There are dictionaries of philosophy; of the Bible; of
mathematics; of natural history, zoology, botany; of birds, trees,
plants and flowers; of chemistry, geology and mineralogy; of
architecture, painting and music; of medicine, surgery, anatomy,
pathology and physiology; of diplomacy; of law, canon, civil, statutory
and criminal; of political and social sciences; of agriculture, rural
economy and gardening; of commerce, navigation, horsemanship and the
military arts; of mechanics, machines and the manual arts. There are
dictionaries of antiquities, of chronology, of dates, of genealogy, of
heraldry, of diplomatics, of abbreviations, of useful receipts, of
monograms, of adulterations and of very many other subjects. These works
are separately referred to in the bibliographies attached to the
articles on the separate subjects. And lastly, there are dictionaries of
the arts and sciences, and their comprehensive offspring, encyclopaedias
(q.v.), which include in themselves every branch of knowledge. Neither
under the heading of _dictionary_ nor under that of _encyclopaedia_ do
we propose to include a mention of every work of its class, but many of
these will be referred to in the separate articles on the subjects to
which they pertain. And in this article we confine ourselves to an
account of those dictionaries which are primarily word-books. This is
practically the most convenient distinction from the subject-book or
encyclopaedia; though the two characters are often combined in one work.
Thus the _Century Dictionary_ has encyclopaedic features, while the
present edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, restoring its
earlier tradition but carrying out the idea more systematically, also
embodies dictionary features.

_Dictionarium_ is a word of low or modern Latinity;[1] _dictio_, from
which it was formed, was used in medieval Latin to mean a word.
_Lexicon_ is a corresponding word of Greek origin, meaning a book of or
for words--a dictionary. A _glossary_ is properly a collection of
unusual or foreign words requiring explanation. It is the name
frequently given to English dictionaries of dialects, which the Germans
usually call _idioticon_, and the Italians _vocabolario_. _Worterbuch_,
a book of words, was first used among the Germans, according to Grimm,
by Kramer (1719), imitated from the Dutch _woordenboek_. From the
Germans the Swe