A Table Alphabeticall

A Table Alphabeticall was Robert Cawdrey’s 1604 attempt to meet a long-standing demand for a dictionary of English. A small book of 120 pages and about 2,500 entries, it offered a limited account of the language rather than a complete record, but established a landmark: it was the first true monolingual English dictionary.

Compilation and Form

Cawdrey, a schoolmaster who had taught in Rutland and later Coventry, gathered material by reading and taking extensive notes from the reference books available to him. He published the result in 1604, the year William Shakespeare probably wrote Measure for Measure. Its full title was A Table Alphabeticall… of Hard Unusual English Words. The modest octavo volume contained about 2,500 word entries, giving the work the compact scale of an early practical reference book.

Intended Readers and Scope

Cawdrey described the book as being for the benefit of women, gentlewomen, and other people with little learning, who might encounter difficult English in Scripture, sermons, or elsewhere. He also presented it as a means of helping readers use such words aptly themselves. Its purpose was therefore both receptive and instructional: to help readers understand unfamiliar words and to enable them to use them.

The title and stated purpose mark its limits. Rather than documenting the full extent of English, the book concentrated on hard and unusual words. For much of the following century and a half, dictionaries continued to focus on this category, amid vigorous commercial publishing and claims of value in educating the uneducated. Women were counted among those readers, having had less access to schooling than men.

Place in English Lexicography

Before Cawdrey’s work, dictionaries and word lists had appeared in Latin and in Latin-English forms, while some lists arranged vocabulary by subject rather than alphabetically. A full English dictionary, however, remained an unmet want. A Table Alphabeticall was an imperfect answer, but its publication changed the history of the form: it was the first genuine dictionary in English that defined English words in English. Its small size and selective vocabulary did not diminish that distinction; the book’s significance lies in making English itself the subject of a monolingual dictionary.