1169. In this bonus segment, originally released in November, we look at Peter Sokolowski's "Tale of Two Dictionaries," tracing the word "dictionary" back to a 16th-century Latin work by a monk named Calepino. We look at how this original source led to the first monolingual dictionaries in both English and French, all within a year of each other.
1169. In this bonus segment, originally released in November, we look at Peter Sokolowski's "Tale of Two Dictionaries," tracing the word "dictionary" back to a 16th-century Latin work by a monk named Calepino. We look at how this original source led to the first monolingual dictionaries in both English and French, all within a year of each other.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: While we continue our short season break from regular interviews, please enjoy this bonus discussion I had with Peter Sokolowski back in November. It ran for Grammarpaloozians at the time who support the show! And many thanks to them.
Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. I am here today with Peter Sokolowski, editor at large from Merriam-Webster, and he has a fascinating tale to tell us. He calls it the “Tale of Two Dictionaries” about happenings in France and London in the 1500s.
Peter Sokolowski: Absolutely. Well, first of all, I never really knew where "dictionary" came from. I just take it for granted. I mean, even me working here with all of these books and doing a lot of research recently, looking back a little and then a little more, and then a little more. I kept going all the way back. And what I found was many, many scholars made reference to one source book, one source dictionary that was used in Latin in the Renaissance. And that was sort of the dictionary that was used internationally all over Europe. It was by a monk. And the monk's name was Calepino in 1502. Calepino's Dictionary was the big classical Latin dictionary.
And when I say classical Latin, that's to distinguish it from the medieval Latin that had preceded it. And the Renaissance really was about language. People don't recognize or remember perhaps that the rebirth was a rediscovery of the kind of high rhetoric of Cicero and Virgil and the great poets and rhetoricians of that period around 100 BC to 100 AD. And that rediscovery led scholars to reconsider what they suddenly felt was an inferior form of Latin, the medieval Latin of St. Jerome. That was the Vulgate Bible and the Latin of the church of the time. There was a sudden kind of reboot and said, let's, instead of the medieval Latin, let's make Renaissance or new classical Latin as the standard. One important point is that the big standard dictionary before this time was published, we think, printed by Gutenberg himself. And that dictionary was called the Catholicon. "Catholic" meaning universal.
Now, what was interesting about Calepino's dictionary is first of all, it was based on classical Latin, not medieval Latin. And second of all, he called it “the dictionarium” or the dictionary, or the speech book. Because "dictio" from "diction" means "speech." That was not the standard term for a word book at that time. It was his title. People had other titles, like “promptorium” or “closet.” They'd say a cabinet of words or “fortus,” a garden of words, or "thesaurus," thesaurus, a treasury of words.There are all these different images used, but Calepino was influential because he chose the word "dictionary." Then what happened was his dictionary started to be translated, and it was translated into the vernacular languages, ultimately 10, 11, 12 languages. You'd get your Calepino, and there would be a little translation into Flemish, English, Spanish, Italian, French, German.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Peter Sokolowski: And so it became the standard dictionary for translation all over Europe. So much so that the word "Calepino" became synonymous with the word "dictionary." Now, that's similar to the word "Webster's" today. People say, "Look it up in Webster's," or "according to Webster." And if you look or if you know where to look, Erasmus, Montaigne, some of the great writers of this period, they say, "I looked it up in my Calepino." They don't say "dictionary." They don’t say "lexicon," though they do say those other words, but they often referred to it with no other explanation, just the word "Calepino." So much so that if you look in the Oxford English Dictionary under "Calpin," C-A-L-P-I-N, there is an entry, an obsolete entry that simply means a polyglot dictionary.
Mignon Fogarty: Hmm
So Spencer used it this way, and other writers even in English. Now, the French word, if you are a French speaker, the word "Calepin" exists today in modern French. It means a blank notebook, like a little notepad, like those nice…
Mignon Fogarty: Like a Moleskine.
Peter Sokolowski: A Moleskine. Exactly. That is specifically—and in fact, if you Google "Calepin" right now, you will find a company that makes something that looks just like a Moleskine.
That is the generic term. It sells a brand name, but it all comes from the name of this monk who wrote this dictionary. Now it's a tool for translation.
Ultimately, what happened was a more complete translation of Calepino was made. What I mean by that is not translating the headwords, but translating the definitions. Those are two different things. And so this was undertaken in the 16th century by scholars. And as it happens, what I discovered was that it was undertaken at the same time, using the same basic text or the same original text in Paris and in London. And this involved another big cultural moment, the Reformation, because now what you had was people could read the Bible in the vernacular in French or in English at home. This was new. This was new. I mean, William Tyndale, the first complete translator of the English Bible, you might know, was also burned at the stake. This was an important moment in the politics of language and the identity of these vernaculars. What you had were two Protestants. A Protestant scholar, who was also a printer named Robert Estienne, often called Staphanus, by his Latin name, who was working in Paris, who translated into French the definitions of Calepino. In England, a man from the court of King Henry VIII, Sir Thomas Elyot, did the same thing, translated the dictionary definitions of Calepino into English.
And what's interesting is that in 1538, Thomas Elyot published his bilingual Latin-English dictionary with the title "Dictionary," and that's the first time the word "dictionary" was used as the title for a book printed in the English language. And in 1539, one year later, Robert Estienne across the channel in Paris, published his Latin-French dictionary, and he called it "Dictionnaire." It was the first time the word "dictionary" in French was used as the title for a book printed in France.
Mignon Fogarty: Do you think they knew each other? Of each other?
Peter Sokolowski: I cannot know that. I doubt it, although they were both prominent scholars in their respective countries. They were both prominent Protestants as well. And so that was a moment, as you might know, in France in particular, of religious wars. And in England, you had King Henry VIII who had separated from the Church, so that the religious persecution went in the opposite direction. If you were Catholic in England, it was a problem. If you were Protestant in France, it was a problem, so much so that Robert Estienne moved to Geneva, where he became the official printer to Jean Calvin, to Calvin himself.
And there, as the printer decided with his edition of the Bible, to split up the chapters of the Bible into what he called verses. And so to this day, when we say chapter and verse, we are referring to the specific mechanical change made by Robert Estienne, the great lexicographer in the French language, to the French edition of the Bible in the 1540s. So that's kind of interesting too. But what you have now is the origin of the word dictionary and also the origins of the vernacular dictionaries. And here's why: the English version by Thomas Elyot is the basis of what became the first monolingual English dictionary in 1604. It's usually called “A Table Alphabetical” by Robert Cawdrey.
His primary source was the Latin-English dictionary that was, in fact, a new version of what Thomas Elyot had made. And in France, correspondingly, in 1606, so you can see we're within 12 to 20 months in both cases. You had the first monolingual dictionary in French by Jean Nicot. He called it "Thresor…," "Treasure of the French Language.” Nicot, whose name we still know to this day because his name is also the origin of the word nicotine.
Mignon Fogarty: Huh.
Peter Sokolowski: He was like Elyot. They were both diplomats as well as scholars. He brought tobacco from Portugal back to Paris to the court in Paris. That's why we use the word nicotine today. But Nicot's dictionary was based on Estienne’s translation, and Cawdrey's dictionary was based on Elyot's translation.
So what we have is the original Latin from Calipino translated into French and English, and then turned into the first monolingual dictionaries in both languages. That, I cannot believe, is a total coincidence, but I also believe was not coordinated. So the reason they're not a coincidence was because you had these movements of the Renaissance followed by the Reformation and the importance of the vernacular and having a Bible in your own language at home. Again, the Catholic people did not have Bibles at home, and they could not read them, mostly. It was the priest in church on Sundays who would explain it to you. But the Protestant tradition, of course, was to follow Martin Luther's example. He had translated the Bible into German. Now you had the Bible in English. Now you had the Bible in French.
And so these things all worked together, and you have to kind of thread these three ideas of classical Latin, the importance of the vernacular, and the Reformation, and the idea of a vernacular Bible. And when you have those three ideas in a period of just 50 or 60 years, you have the invention of the monolingual dictionaries and a kind of amazing common origin.
And that's the point that I think is the most unusual: that the language groups in Europe, because this was also true in Spanish, Italian, and German, but in particular in French and English, that they used the same source for their first dictionaries. We think of these languages as being so different today. Keep in mind the first dictionaries of English were just lists of the words that we borrowed from Latin. And so that makes perfect sense when you realize that those are also the words that our data shows at Merriam-Webster. Words like “integrity,” “ubiquitous,” “paradigm,” “conundrum,” “democracy”—those are the words that people still look up the most to this very day. They're the trouble words in English, the test words in English, the SAT words, and that's kind of an interesting thing.
Now there's one postscript. You can see I get excited about this. I love this story, but there's one postscript about the Thomas Elyot dictionary. Elyot, after his death, it was updated and revised by a man named Thomas Cooper. Thomas Cooper's edition in 1565. It is known was the dictionary in the classroom in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is the dictionary that was used by Shakespeare as a child. We all presume that Shakespeare attended that school, but we do have records of what the dictionary was, possibly chained, to the desk.
Because chained books in libraries and in schools were the common way to keep big, important books. And then that same edition was updated by another scholar, Thomas Thomas. Thomas Thomas was the printer, the first printer at Cambridge University. And so he took Cooper's revision of Elyot, and he made a new version. That was the version used by Robert Cawdrey in 1604 to make the first English dictionary.
Now, Robert Cawdrey was a Puritan preacher. He was a Puritan preacher, and he was actually fired from his congregation by the Anglican Church. So that should trigger a little memory of school that the dispute within the Church of England between the Protestants, or the Puritans, and the, what we might call the Anglicans, is exactly the dispute that led the pilgrims to leave England and come on the Mayflower. So that led me to wonder: what was the dictionary used by those Puritans?
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Peter Sokolowski: Puritans in London were using Thomas Thomas's dictionary. And so I wrote to the museum in Holland, the Museum of the Pilgrims, and they do have the inventory, and I was right. Thomas Thomas's dictionary came over on the Mayflower in the baggage of William Brewster, who was the second governor of Plymouth.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Peter Sokolowski: And so we know which dictionary Shakespeare would have had as a student, and which dictionary was carried over on the Mayflower. And they're all connected backward to Calipino and forward to the first monolingual dictionary of English. Again, keeping things with religion and reading the Bible and the vernacular very closely to the development of dictionaries in Europe.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow. What a story. That's amazing! And this is from your new book. I know you just finished writing this book, so it's not going to be out for a while. But we will definitely have you back on when your book is ready and available for people to actually buy, because these are amazing stories.
Peter Sokolowski: I never knew that things connected so much. And that's really the big thing I learned in doing this research. I went to Oxford to look at the only copy. There's only one copy in the world of Cawdrey's Table Alphabetical, the first monolingual dictionary of English. It's a tiny little thing. I mean, a lot of smartphones have a larger footprint than this little kind of pocketbook.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh.
Peter Sokolowski: And yet the Calipino Dictionary is a huge, you know, folio, 900 pages, much the way we think of a dictionary today. And it took English a long time, a lot of growing pains. And that's one of the things I would also like to say about Thomas Elyot. He was an advocate for English because, at that time, learned writing—legal writing, bureaucratic writing—was all done in Latin.
He could write in Latin very well, but he said, you know, English should, for example, he said, you know, this word that we have for a mature person or a mature fruit, this Anglo-Saxon word, ripe, he said, I think we should distinguish ripe from what is mature. And when discussing a person or an intellect, let's use the Latin word. And when we're discussing fruit and vegetables, let's use the Anglo-Saxon word. So this distinction between ripe and mature was an arbitrary artificial distinction that he deliberately made.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh.
Peter Sokolowski: And he started this trend of doublets. So in his writings, his famous book was called The Book of the Governor, kind of a manual for young men, like Machiavelli's The Prince.
It was similar, and there are other books like this at the time, and he would write, if you just read a few pages, you'll see often he puts two words together, and one will always be the French or Latin word with the English word. So acceleration or haste, ambiguous or doubtful, explicating or unfolding, exterior or outward, frugality or moderation, obfuscate or hide, satiety or fullness, timorous or fear.
And what you see is some of them are kind of Latin and French, but most of them are really Latin and English words. And this leads us to something that we all know, but we never thought about the strange, strange phenomenon in the English language. I'll just read them. You'll get it.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, do.
Peter Sokolowski: Law and order, cease and desist, null and void, will and testament, rules and regulations. English has this weird way of pairing the Latin or French with the Anglo-Saxon words in many cases, or they're the Latin words with the French words. The French words on the ground would have been more familiar to English speakers in the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries after the Norman Conquest.
But the point is the laws were in French and in Latin, but the people spoke English, so you had to make a translation for these legal terms. And that's why legal terms in English to this day, because "cease and desist" they mean the same thing. "Rules and regulations" they mean the same thing. And, you know, "law and order," they mean the same thing.
We have this habit in English, which comes directly from the artificial imposition of Latin and French next to or juxtaposed with the Anglo-Saxon words. And what's interesting in the work of Thomas Elyot is you see it happening in real time. You see it happening while it was changing.
And now, of course, we just take it for granted that we have two words for everything in our legal documents. That's not true in French. It's not true in other languages. It's an English thing.
Mignon Fogarty: That's amazing. I mean, in my 20 years of working on language, that's context about the word pairs I've never heard before. That is amazing.
Peter Sokolowski: And it makes perfect sense when you realize that the laws were enforced by people who spoke Latin and French. And that just explains everything about the richness of English as well, but also the hierarchy of that culture, that you had one group of people who were ruling another group of people, and they represented two different language groups.
And then that meant that the French speakers had a higher social position than the English speakers. It also meant, in a very basic way, that most people who spoke English in that period were probably illiterate. If you spoke Latin, you were educated. That meant you almost certainly could read the Bible and produce legal texts. And the nobles were, of course. And that’s the other thing. I mean, the most English institution that we can think of is the aristocracy. But every single one of those words, you know, "baron," "viscount," "count," “duke,” they're all, they're... it's not the English aristocracy; it's the Norman aristocracy.
They're French words. The only Old English word that was retained was the word "earl." And "earl" substitutes for the rank of "count." The European rank of count. And, of course, the wife of an earl is a "countess," so the rank is the same. But the earls were the original group of the circle of nobles around the kings of England in the Old English period.
That's the only word that was retained other than "king" and "queen," which, of course, are Old English words. But all the rest, including "princess" and "duchess," they’re all, of course, the English aristocracy; it is the most French thing about England.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Well, I can't wait to get your book recommendations. You just have this wealth of knowledge. Like what books have been most influential on you or that you would give to a friend as a gift?
Peter Sokolowski: Well, I mean, I've been thinking for more than two years only about this research project, and it was about language, and it's made me appreciate good writing, and good writing about language. And that's a hard thing to do. A lot of academic writing about dictionaries but about language can be rough going or it’s made for academic purposes and really isn't so easy to read.
One of my favorite writers of this kind of book, the kind of book that treats language and grammar and that history, is Jack Lynch. And it's called The Lexicographer's Dilemma. And Jack Lynch is a professor at Rutgers. He is also a beautiful writer and storyteller. He's really a scholar of Samuel Johnson.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh.
Peter Sokolowski: And, of course, Johnson is one of the most characterful personages in the whole history of English lexicography. His definition, of course, of "lexicographer" is "a harmless drudge," and it's a kind of badge of honor that we wear to this day. I was thinking I could easily have only given book recommendations about language and dictionaries, but I am happy that you said maybe not, maybe not only books about my day job. And I remembered I'm going to give one novel, and this is one of my favorite novels. It's called The Debt to Pleasure.
John Lanchester, a British writer, who writes a lot for The New Yorker. He is also a journalist. He writes about economics as well now. He's one of my favorite writing stylists. I just read him, and I think I want to write sentences like this guy. But The Debt to Pleasure takes a food critic, a British man working in the south of France. So already the setting I like. I love little reflections on wine and food, but this book interrogates not just with its narrative, which is a mystery, but with its text.
In other words, the narrator is the narrator, an unreliable narrator. Are we to believe what he says about things like culture, like taste, like snobbism, like food, and wine, but also about morality and ethics and other questions? And so it's a delicious read, an easy read, but you realize he's operating on a couple of levels and they twist together beautifully. The last recommendation, this is a book in French that I've been reading. It is also available in English.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay, good.
Peter Sokolowski: It's by Antoine Compagnon, who's a famous scholar of Montaigne. My favorite writer is Montaigne, Michel de Montaigne, the great philosopher who is a contemporary of Shakespeare. And this is called Un Été avec Montaigne. It means A Summer with Montaigne, and it is a short book of short chapters, very short chapters. It's such an easy and appealing way to dig into Montaigne's ideas, which are also based on Seneca and Virgil and Plato, and many of the philosophers that he read. He was a Renaissance man, a true Renaissance man.
But, you know, he said something that will, I think, touch your heart as well as mine. One of my favorite sentences of Montaigne is, "They who would prefer grammar to custom are fools." And I love that he connects language with life in that way, in a way that makes sense to a lot of us, that recognizes that usage and custom or the customary use of language, which is actually the definition of usage in a linguistic sense, it can also apply to manners, can also apply to ethics, can also apply to your day-to-day life. But this is just a wonderful, easy read, and I've just been enjoying it, so I hope you do too.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, Peter, thank you. This has been so fascinating. I've learned so much in this just little short amount of time. I appreciate your time. Thank you for being here. Peter Sokolowski, editor at large from Merriam-Webster, who has a book coming out in probably about a year that I can't wait to read, but we had a little preview here. Peter, where can people follow you online, so they are sure to find out when your book comes out?
Peter Sokolowski: Oh, right. I'm a lot less online these days.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Peter Sokolowski: But you can find me at Bluesky for the most part. I will get a website up at some point. The book's title I am pleased to say is By Definition.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, you have a title already?
Peter Sokolowski: Yeah, and that was just a placeholder initially. And then I realized doing it that really what I'm doing is close readings of definitions through 400 years of English dictionaries. And by doing that, you actually notice everything. You can reverse engineer the thought process of the Renaissance, and then the Enlightenment, and then the American Revolution, and then the 20th century, you know, it kind of carries us through. And so By Definition is also a short title, which I like a lot.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Yeah. So when you're looking for it to pre-order, look for By Definition by Peter Sokolowski. Peter, thanks so much for being here.
Peter Sokolowski: Thank you, Mignon.