The English language was, to cultured Elizabethans, like a new-found and wonderful inheritance. And they reveled in it, they sported with it in every conceivable way.' And so the dictionary came ...

Excerpt from the 'Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language' (Sp Coll Mu51-c.25, pp 4-5) The first step in the evolution of the dictionary as a form was the gloss. Synonyms would be written in ...

An open source English language dictionary with 176,023 definitions. This is based on the Source Forge Project: MySQL English Dictionary , which in turn in based on the The Online Plain Text English ...