have been impossible to predict in the year 1538, when Sir Thomas
Elyot published his 'Dictionary,' that this name would supplant all
the others, and even take the place of the older and better-descended
word _Vocabulary_; much less that _Dictionary_ should become so much a
name to conjure with, as to be applied to works which are not
word-books at all, but reference-books on all manner of subjects, as
Chronology, Geography, Music, Commerce, Manufactures, Chemistry, or
National Biography, arranged in Alphabetical or 'Dictionary order.'
The very phrase, 'Dictionary order,' would in the first half of the
sixteenth century have been unmeaning, for all dictionaries were not
yet alphabetical. There is indeed no other connexion between a
dictionary and alphabetical order, than that of a balance of
convenience. Experience has shown that though an alphabetical order
makes the matter of a dictionary very disjointed, scattering the
terminology of a particular art, science, or subject, all over the
book, and even when related words come together, often putting the
unimportant derivative in front of the important primitive word, it is
yet that by which a word or heading can be found, with least trouble
and exercise of thought. But this experience has been only gradually
acquired; even now the native dictionaries of some Oriental languages
are often not in alphabetical order; in such a language as Chinese,
indeed, there is no alphabetical order in which to place the words,
and they follow each other in the dictionary in a purely arbitrary and
conventional fashion. In English, as we have seen, many of the
vocabularies from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, were arranged
under class-headings according to subject; and, although Sir Thomas
Elyot's Dictionary was actually in alphabetical order, that of J.
Withals, published in 1554, under the title 'A short dictionarie for
young beginners,' and with the colophon 'Thus endeth this Dictionary
very useful for Children, compiled by J. Withals,' reverts to the