l arrangement one stage further; instead of
transcribing the A-words as they stood, he went through them, picking
out first those that began with Aa-, then those in Ab-, then those in
Ac-, and so on, to Az. Then he did the same with the B-words, picking
out first all in Ba-, then Be-, Bi-, Bl-, Bo-, Br-, Bu-, By-; and so
exhausting the B-words. Thus, at length, in this second recension, the
Vocabulary stood, not yet completely alphabetical, but alphabetized as
far as the second letter of each word.

All these stages can actually be seen in four of the most ancient
glossaries of English origin that have come down to us, known
respectively, from the libraries to which they now belong, as the
Leiden, the Epinal, the Erfurt, and the Corpus (the last at Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge). The Leiden Glossary represents the
earliest stage of such a work, being really, in the main, a collection
of smaller glossaries, or rather sets of glosses, each set entered
under the name of the treatise from which it was extracted, the words
in each being left in the order in which they happened to come in the
treatise or work, without any further arrangement, alphabetical or
other. It appears also to incorporate in a final section some small
earlier vocabularies or lists of names of animals and other classes of
things. In order to discover whether any particular word occurs in
this glossary, the whole work from beginning to end must be looked
through. The first advance upon this is seen in the Epinal Glossary,
which uses part at least of the materials of the Leiden, incorporating
with them many others. This glossary has advanced to _first-letter_
order: all the A-words come together, followed by all the B-words, and
so on to Z, but there is no further arrangement under the individual
letters[1]. There are nearly fourteen columns of words beginning with
A, containing each about forty entries; the whole of these 550 entries
must be looked through to see if a given word occurs in this glossary.
The third stage is represented by the Corpus Glossary, which contains
the materials of its predecessors, and a great deal more, and in which
the alphabetical arrangement has been carried as far as the second
letter of each word: thus the first ninety-five words explained begin
with Ab-, and the next seventy-eight with Ac-, and so on, but the
alphabetization goes no further[2]; the glossary is in _second-letter_
order. In at least one glossary of the t