_Catholicon Anglicum_, that is, the English Catholicon or Universal
treatise, after the name of the celebrated Latin dictionary of the
Middle Ages, the _Catholicon_ or _Summa_ of Johannes de Balbis, or
John of Genoa, made in 1286. The English _Catholicon_ was in itself a
work almost equally valuable with the _Promptorium_; but it appears
never to have attained to the currency of the _Promptorium_, which
appeared as a printed book in 1499, while the _Catholicon_ remained in
two MSS. till printed for the Early English Text Society in 1881.

The Renascence of Ancient Learning had now reached England, and during
the sixteenth century there were compiled and published many important
Latin-English and English-Latin vocabularies and dictionaries. Among
these special mention must be made of the Dictionary of Sir Thomas
Elyot, Knight, the first work, so far as I know, which took to itself
in English what was destined to be the famous name of DICTIONARY, in
mediaeval Latin, _Dictionarius liber_, or _Dictionarium_, literally a
repertory of _dictiones_, a word originally meaning 'sayings,' but
already by the later Latin grammarians used in the sense of _verba_ or
_vocabula_ 'words.' The early vocabularies and dictionaries had many
names, often quaint and striking; thus one of _c_1420 is entitled the
_Nominale_, or Name-book; mention has already been made of the
_Medulla Grammatices_, or Marrow of Grammar, the _Ortus Vocabulorum_,
or Garden of Words, the _Promptorium Parvulorum_, and the _Catholicon
Anglicum_; later we find the _Manipulus Vocabulorum_, or Handful of
Vocables, the _Alvearie_ or Beehive, the _Abecedarium_, the
_Bibliotheca_, or Library, the _Thesaurus_, or Treasury of Words--what
Old English times would have called the _Word-hord_, the _World of
Words_, the _Table Alphabetical_, the _English Expositor_, the _Ductor
in Linguas_, or Guide to the Tongues, the _Glossographia_, the _New
World of Words_, the _Etymologicum_, the _Gazophylacium_; and it would