102-514: The Collins English Dictionary is a printed and online dictionary of English. It is published by HarperCollins in Glasgow . It was first published in 1979. The dictionary uses language research based on the Collins Corpus, which is continually updated and has over 20 billion words. The 1979 edition of the dictionary, with Patrick Hanks as editor and Laurence Urdang as editorial director,
204-554: A business dictionary ), a single-field dictionary narrowly covers one particular subject field (e.g. law), and a sub-field dictionary covers a more specialized field (e.g. constitutional law). For example, the 23-language Inter-Active Terminology for Europe is a multi-field dictionary, the American National Biography is a single-field, and the African American National Biography Project
306-521: A specialized dictionary , also referred to as a technical dictionary, is a dictionary that focuses upon a specific subject field, as opposed to a dictionary that comprehensively contains words from the lexicon of a specific language or languages. Following the description in The Bilingual LSP Dictionary , lexicographers categorize specialized dictionaries into three types: A multi-field dictionary broadly covers several subject fields (e.g.
408-524: A "Sumerian renaissance" in the past. Already, the region was becoming more Semitic than Sumerian, with the resurgence of the Akkadian-speaking Semites in Assyria and elsewhere, and the influx of waves of Semitic Martu ( Amorites ), who founded several competing local powers in the south, including Isin , Larsa , Eshnunna and later, Babylonia. The last of these eventually came to briefly dominate
510-401: A "dictionary", although modern scholarship considers it a calligraphic compendium of Chinese characters from Zhou dynasty bronzes. Philitas of Cos (fl. 4th century BCE) wrote a pioneering vocabulary Disorderly Words (Ἄτακτοι γλῶσσαι, Átaktoi glôssai ) which explained the meanings of rare Homeric and other literary words, words from local dialects, and technical terms. Apollonius
612-520: A 20th-century enterprise, called lexicography , and largely initiated by Ladislav Zgusta . The birth of the new discipline was not without controversy, with the practical dictionary-makers being sometimes accused by others of having an "astonishing" lack of method and critical-self reflection. The oldest known dictionaries were cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian – Akkadian wordlists, discovered in Ebla (modern Syria ) and dated to roughly 2300 BCE,
714-405: A General Dictionary" which boldly plagiarized Blount's work, and the two criticised each other. This created more interest in the dictionaries. John Wilkins ' 1668 essay on philosophical language contains a list of 11,500 words with careful distinctions, compiled by William Lloyd . Elisha Coles published his "English Dictionary" in 1676. It was not until Samuel Johnson 's A Dictionary of
816-635: A century in the Third Dynasty of Ur at approximately 2100–2000 BC, but the Akkadian language also remained in use for some time. The Sumerians were entirely unknown during the early period of modern archeology. Jules Oppert was the first scholar to publish the word Sumer in a lecture on 17 January 1869. The first major excavations of Sumerian cities were in 1877 at Girsu by the French archeologist Ernest de Sarzec , in 1889 at Nippur by John Punnett Peters from
918-530: A dictionary between Oghuz Turkish, Arabic and Persian. But it is not clear who wrote the dictionary or in which century exactly it was published. It was written in old Anatolian Turkish from the Seljuk period and not the late medieval Ottoman period. In India around 1320, Amir Khusro compiled the Khaliq-e-bari, which mainly dealt with Hindustani and Persian words. Arabic dictionaries were compiled between
1020-582: A difficult environment. Others have suggested a continuity of Sumerians, from the indigenous hunter-fisherfolk traditions, associated with the bifacial assemblages found on the Arabian littoral. Juris Zarins believes the Sumerians may have been the people living in the Persian Gulf region before it flooded at the end of the last Ice Age. In the early Sumerian period, the primitive pictograms suggest that There
1122-530: A number of websites which operate as online dictionaries, usually with a specialized focus. Some of them have exclusively user driven content, often consisting of neologisms . Some of the more notable examples are given in List of online dictionaries and Category:Online dictionaries . Sumer Sumer ( / ˈ s uː m ər / ) is the earliest known civilization , located in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia (now south-central Iraq ), emerging during
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#17328299131911224-467: A published dictionary before. As a spelling reformer , Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex, so his dictionary introduced spellings that became American English , replacing "colour" with "color", substituting "wagon" for "waggon", and printing "center" instead of "centre". He also added American words, like "skunk" and "squash", which did not appear in British dictionaries. At
1326-511: A surplus which enabled them to form urban settlements. The world's earliest known texts come from the Sumerian cities of Uruk and Jemdet Nasr , and date to between c. 3350 – c. 2500 BC , following a period of proto-writing c. 4000 – c. 2500 BC . The term "Sumer" ( Akkadian : 𒋗𒈨𒊒 , romanized: šumeru ) comes from the Akkadian name for
1428-596: Is a human being but the direct user is a program. Such a dictionary does not need to be able to be printed on paper. The structure of the content is not linear, ordered entry by entry but has the form of a complex network (see Diathesis alternation ). Because most of these dictionaries are used to control machine translations or cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) the content is usually multilingual and usually of huge size. In order to allow formalized exchange and merging of dictionaries, an ISO standard called Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) has been defined and used among
1530-401: Is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages , often arranged alphabetically (or by consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical and stroke for logographic languages), which may include information on definitions , usage, etymologies , pronunciations , translation , etc. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among
1632-489: Is a sub-field dictionary. In terms of the coverage distinction between "minimizing dictionaries" and "maximizing dictionaries", multi-field dictionaries tend to minimize coverage across subject fields (for instance, Oxford Dictionary of World Religions and Yadgar Dictionary of Computer and Internet Terms ) whereas single-field and sub-field dictionaries tend to maximize coverage within a limited subject field ( The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology ). Another variant
1734-417: Is also a contrast between prescriptive or descriptive dictionaries; the former reflect what is seen as correct use of the language while the latter reflect recorded actual use. Stylistic indications (e.g. "informal" or "vulgar") in many modern dictionaries are also considered by some to be less than objectively descriptive. The first recorded dictionaries date back to Sumerian times around 2300 BCE, in
1836-579: Is considerable evidence concerning Sumerian music . Lyres and flutes were played, among the best-known examples being the Lyres of Ur . Sumerian culture was male-dominated and stratified. The Code of Ur-Nammu , the oldest such codification yet discovered, dating to the Ur III, reveals a glimpse at societal structure in late Sumerian law. Beneath the lu-gal ("great man" or king), all members of society belonged to one of two basic strata: The " lu " or free person, and
1938-585: Is considered the first dictionary of Arabic . The oldest existing Japanese dictionary, the c. 835 CE Tenrei Banshō Meigi , was also a glossary of written Chinese. In Frahang-i Pahlavig , Aramaic heterograms are listed together with their translation in the Middle Persian language and phonetic transcription in the Pazend alphabet. A 9th-century CE Irish dictionary, Sanas Cormaic , contained etymologies and explanations of over 1,400 Irish words. In
2040-503: Is first attested in proper names of the kings of Kish c. 2800 BC , preserved in later king lists. There are texts written entirely in Old Akkadian dating from c. 2500 BC . Use of Old Akkadian was at its peak during the rule of Sargon the Great ( c. 2334 –2279 BC), but even then most administrative tablets continued to be written in Sumerian, the language used by
2142-407: Is little break in historical continuity between the pre- and post-Sargon periods, and that too much emphasis has been placed on the perception of a "Semitic vs. Sumerian" conflict. It is certain that Akkadian was also briefly imposed on neighboring parts of Elam that were previously conquered, by Sargon. c. 2193–2119 BC (middle chronology) c. 2200 –2110 BC (middle chronology) Following
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#17328299131912244-516: Is marked by a distinctive style of fine quality painted pottery which spread throughout Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf . The oldest evidence for occupation comes from Tell el-'Oueili , but, given that environmental conditions in southern Mesopotamia were favourable to human occupation well before the Ubaid period, it is likely that older sites exist but have not yet been found. It appears that this culture
2346-466: Is more prescriptive, offering warnings and admonitions against the use of certain words considered by many to be offensive or illiterate, such as, "an offensive term for..." or "a taboo term meaning...". Because of the widespread use of dictionaries in schools, and their acceptance by many as language authorities, their treatment of the language does affect usage to some degree, with even the most descriptive dictionaries providing conservative continuity. In
2448-404: Is most clearly seen at Tell el-'Oueili near Larsa , excavated by the French in the 1980s, where eight levels yielded pre-Ubaid pottery resembling Samarran ware. According to this theory, farming peoples spread down into southern Mesopotamia because they had developed a temple-centered social organization for mobilizing labor and technology for water control, enabling them to survive and prosper in
2550-546: Is respelled as "dĭk ′ shə-nĕr′ē" in the American Heritage Dictionary . The IPA is more commonly used within the British Commonwealth countries. Yet others use their own pronunciation respelling systems without diacritics: for example, dictionary may be respelled as DIK -shə-nerr-ee . Some online or electronic dictionaries provide audio recordings of words being spoken. Histories and descriptions of
2652-492: Is the glossary , an alphabetical list of defined terms in a specialized field, such as medicine ( medical dictionary ). The simplest dictionary, a defining dictionary , provides a core glossary of the simplest meanings of the simplest concepts. From these, other concepts can be explained and defined, in particular for those who are first learning a language. In English, the commercial defining dictionaries typically include only one or two meanings of under 2000 words. With these,
2754-660: The Chalcolithic and early Bronze Ages between the sixth and fifth millennium BC. Like nearby Elam , it is one of the cradles of civilization , along with Egypt , the Indus Valley , the Erligang culture of the Yellow River valley, Caral-Supe , and Mesoamerica . Living along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Sumerian farmers grew an abundance of grain and other crops,
2856-465: The Leiden Glossary ). The Catholicon (1287) by Johannes Balbus , a large grammatical work with an alphabetical lexicon, was widely adopted. It served as the basis for several bilingual dictionaries and was one of the earliest books (in 1460) to be printed. In 1502 Ambrogio Calepino 's Dictionarium was published, originally a monolingual Latin dictionary, which over the course of the 16th century
2958-694: The Lisan al-`Arab (13th century, still the best-known large-scale dictionary of Arabic) and al-Qamus al-Muhit (14th century) listed words in the alphabetical order of the radicals. The Qamus al-Muhit is the first handy dictionary in Arabic, which includes only words and their definitions, eliminating the supporting examples used in such dictionaries as the Lisan and the Oxford English Dictionary . In medieval Europe, glossaries with equivalents for Latin words in vernacular or simpler Latin were in use (e.g.
3060-565: The Middle East and were responsible for the spread of farming in the Middle East. However, contrary evidence strongly suggests that the first farming originated in the Fertile Crescent . Although not specifically discussing Sumerians, Lazaridis et al. 2016 have suggested a partial North African origin for some pre-Semitic cultures of the Middle East, particularly Natufians , after testing
3162-520: The University of Pennsylvania between 1889 and 1900, and in Shuruppak by German archeologist Robert Koldewey in 1902–1903. Major publications of these finds were " Decouvertes en Chaldée par Ernest de Sarzec " by Léon Heuzey in 1884, " Les Inscriptions de Sumer et d'Akkad " by François Thureau-Dangin in 1905, and " Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik " on Sumerian grammar by Arno Poebel in 1923. In
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3264-501: The archaeological record shows clear uninterrupted cultural continuity from the time of the early Ubaid period (5300–4700 BC C-14 ) settlements in southern Mesopotamia. The Sumerian people who settled here, farmed the lands in this region that were made fertile by silt deposited by the Tigris and the Euphrates . Some archaeologists have speculated that the original speakers of ancient Sumerian may have been farmers, who moved down from
3366-592: The undeclined or unconjugated form appears as the headword in most dictionaries. Dictionaries are most commonly found in the form of a book, but some newer dictionaries, like StarDict and the New Oxford American Dictionary are dictionary software running on PDAs or computers . There are also many online dictionaries accessible via the Internet . According to the Manual of Specialized Lexicographies ,
3468-415: The " Dynasty of Isin " in the Sumerian king list, ending with the rise of Babylonia under Hammurabi c. 1800 BC. Later rulers who dominated Assyria and Babylonia occasionally assumed the old Sargonic title "King of Sumer and Akkad", such as Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria after c. 1225 BC. Uruk, one of Sumer's largest cities, has been estimated to have had a population of 50,000–80,000 at its height. Given
3570-453: The "Sumerians", the ancient non- Semitic -speaking inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia . In their inscriptions, the Sumerians called their land "Kengir", the "Country of the noble lords" ( Sumerian : 𒆠 𒂗 𒄀 , romanized: ki-en-gi(-r) , lit. ''country" + "lords" + "noble''), and their language "Emegir" ( Sumerian : 𒅴𒂠 , romanized: eme-g̃ir or 𒅴𒄀 eme-gi 15 ). The origin of
3672-519: The 12th century, The Karakhanid - Turkic scholar Mahmud Kashgari finished his work " Divan-u Lügat'it Türk ", a dictionary about the Turkic dialects, but especially Karakhanid Turkic . His work contains about 7500 to 8000 words and it was written to teach non Turkic Muslims, especially the Abbasid Arabs, the Turkic language. Al-Zamakhshari wrote a small Arabic dictionary called "Muḳaddimetü'l-edeb" for
3774-479: The 1969 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language , the first dictionary to use corpus linguistics . In a general dictionary, each word may have multiple meanings. Some dictionaries include each separate meaning in the order of most common usage while others list definitions in historical order, with the oldest usage first. In many languages, words can appear in many different forms, but only
3876-450: The 8th and 14th centuries, organizing words in rhyme order (by the last syllable), by alphabetical order of the radicals , or according to the alphabetical order of the first letter (the system used in modern European language dictionaries). The modern system was mainly used in specialist dictionaries, such as those of terms from the Qur'an and hadith , while most general use dictionaries, such as
3978-435: The Akkadian and Ur III phases, there was a shift from the cultivation of wheat to the more salt-tolerant barley , but this was insufficient, and during the period from 2100 BC to 1700 BC, it is estimated that the population in this area declined by nearly three-fifths. This greatly upset the balance of power within the region, weakening the areas where Sumerian was spoken, and comparatively strengthening those where Akkadian
4080-772: The Collins Bank of English Corpus, word frequencies and trends from the Google Ngrams project, and word images from Flickr . In August 2012, CollinsDictionary.com introduced crowd-sourcing for neologisms , whilst still maintaining overall editorial control to remain distinct from Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary . This followed an earlier launch of a discussion forum for neologisms in 2004. In May 2015, CollinsDictionary.com added 6,500 new Scrabble words to their Collins Official Scrabble Wordlist. The words are based on terms related to and influenced by slang, social media, food, technology, and more. Dictionary A dictionary
4182-529: The Dutch and the Germans call theirs, word-books, than dictionaries in the superior sense of that title." In 1616, John Bullokar described the history of the dictionary with his "English Expositor". Glossographia by Thomas Blount , published in 1656, contains more than 10,000 words along with their etymologies or histories. Edward Phillips wrote another dictionary in 1658, entitled " The New World of English Words : Or
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4284-482: The English Language (1755) that a more reliable English dictionary was produced. Many people today mistakenly believe that Johnson wrote the first English dictionary: a testimony to this legacy. By this stage, dictionaries had evolved to contain textual references for most words, and were arranged alphabetically, rather than by topic (a previously popular form of arrangement, which meant all animals would be grouped together, etc.). Johnson's masterwork could be judged as
4386-515: The English Language; it took twenty-seven years to complete. To evaluate the etymology of words, Webster learned twenty-six languages, including Old English (Anglo-Saxon), German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit . Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris, France, and at the University of Cambridge . His book contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared in
4488-558: The English language were glossaries of French, Spanish or Latin words along with their definitions in English. The word "dictionary" was invented by an Englishman called John of Garland in 1220 – he had written a book Dictionarius to help with Latin "diction". An early non-alphabetical list of 8000 English words was the Elementarie , created by Richard Mulcaster in 1582. The first purely English alphabetical dictionary
4590-587: The Sophist ( fl. 1st century CE) wrote the oldest surviving Homeric lexicon. The first Sanskrit dictionary, the Amarakośa , was written by Amarasimha c. 4th century CE . Written in verse, it listed around 10,000 words. According to the Nihon Shoki , the first Japanese dictionary was the long-lost 682 CE Niina glossary of Chinese characters. Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi's 8th century Kitab al-'Ayn
4692-520: The Sumerian king list whose name is known from any other legendary source is Etana , 13th king of the first dynasty of Kish . The earliest king authenticated through archaeological evidence is Enmebaragesi of Kish (Early Dynastic I), whose name is mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh —leading to the suggestion that Gilgamesh himself might have been a historical king of Uruk. As the Epic of Gilgamesh shows, this period
4794-421: The Sumerians is not known, but the people of Sumer referred to themselves as "Black-Headed Ones" or "Black-Headed People" ( Sumerian : 𒊕 𒈪 , romanized: sag̃-gíg , lit. ''head" + "black'', or 𒊕 𒈪 𒂵 , sag̃-gíg-ga , phonetically /saŋ ɡi ɡa/ , lit. "head" + "black" + relative marker). For example, the Sumerian king Shulgi described himself as "the king of
4896-746: The Sumerians’ sphere of influence (ordered from south to north): Apart from Mari, which lies full 330 kilometres (205 miles) north-west of Agade, but which is credited in the king list as having exercised kingship in the Early Dynastic II period, and Nagar, an outpost, these cities are all in the Euphrates-Tigris alluvial plain, south of Baghdad in what are now the Bābil , Diyala , Wāsit , Dhi Qar , Basra , Al-Muthannā and Al-Qādisiyyah governorates of Iraq . The Sumerian city-states rose to power during
4998-809: The Turkic-Khwarazm ruler Atsiz . In the 14th century, the Codex Cumanicus was finished and it served as a dictionary about the Cuman -Turkic language. While in Mamluk Egypt , Ebû Hayyân el-Endelüsî finished his work "Kitâbü'l-İdrâk li-lisâni'l-Etrâk", a dictionary about the Kipchak and Turcoman languages spoken in Egypt and the Levant . A dictionary called "Bahşayiş Lügati", which is written in old Anatolian Turkish, served also as
5100-469: The Ubaid period to the Uruk period is marked by a gradual shift from painted pottery domestically produced on a slow wheel to a great variety of unpainted pottery mass-produced by specialists on fast wheels. The Uruk period is a continuation and an outgrowth of Ubaid with pottery being the main visible change. By the time of the Uruk period, c. 4100–2900 BC calibrated, the volume of trade goods transported along
5202-500: The Uruk period coincided with the Piora oscillation , a dry period from c. 3200–2900 BC that marked the end of a long wetter, warmer climate period from about 9,000 to 5,000 years ago, called the Holocene climatic optimum . The dynastic period begins c. 2900 BC and was associated with a shift from the temple establishment headed by council of elders led by a priestly "En" (a male figure when it
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#17328299131915304-422: The Uruk period were probably theocratic and were most likely headed by a priest-king ( ensi ), assisted by a council of elders, including both men and women. It is quite possible that the later Sumerian pantheon was modeled upon this political structure. There was little evidence of organized warfare or professional soldiers during the Uruk period, and towns were generally unwalled. During this period Uruk became
5406-568: The actual use of words. Most dictionaries of English now apply the descriptive method to a word's definition, and then, outside of the definition itself, provide information alerting readers to attitudes which may influence their choices on words often considered vulgar, offensive, erroneous, or easily confused. Merriam-Webster is subtle, only adding italicized notations such as, sometimes offensive or stand (nonstandard). American Heritage goes further, discussing issues separately in numerous "usage notes." Encarta provides similar notes, but
5508-477: The age of seventy, Webster published his dictionary in 1828; it sold 2500 copies. In 1840, the second edition was published in two volumes. Webster's dictionary was acquired by G & C Merriam Co. in 1843, after his death, and has since been published in many revised editions. Merriam-Webster was acquired by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1964. Controversy over the lack of usage advice in the 1961 Webster's Third New International Dictionary spurred publication of
5610-430: The canals and rivers of southern Mesopotamia facilitated the rise of many large, stratified , temple-centered cities, with populations of over 10,000 people, where centralized administrations employed specialized workers. It is fairly certain that it was during the Uruk period that Sumerian cities began to make use of slave labour captured from the hill country, and there is ample evidence for captured slaves as workers in
5712-604: The car). Whereas hi taharóg otí , literally 'she will kill me', is colloquial, me (a variant of ma 'what') is archaic, resulting in a combination that is unutterable in real life. A historical dictionary is a specific kind of descriptive dictionary which describes the development of words and senses over time, usually using citations to original source material to support its conclusions. In contrast to traditional dictionaries, which are designed to be used by human beings, dictionaries for natural language processing (NLP) are built to be used by computer programs. The final user
5814-634: The data. A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries . Specialized dictionaries include words in specialist fields, rather than a comprehensive range of words in the language. Lexical items that describe concepts in specific fields are usually called terms instead of words, although there is no consensus whether lexicology and terminology are two different fields of study. In theory, general dictionaries are supposed to be semasiological , mapping word to definition , while specialized dictionaries are supposed to be onomasiological , first identifying concepts and then establishing
5916-534: The dictionaries of other languages on Misplaced Pages include: The age of the Internet brought online dictionaries to the desktop and, more recently, to the smart phone. David Skinner in 2013 noted that "Among the top ten lookups on Merriam-Webster Online at this moment are holistic, pragmatic, caveat, esoteric and bourgeois. Teaching users about words they don't already know has been, historically, an aim of lexicography, and modern dictionaries do this well." There exist
6018-699: The downfall of the Akkadian Empire at the hands of Gutians , another native Sumerian ruler, Gudea of Lagash, rose to local prominence and continued the practices of the Sargonic kings ' claims to divinity. The previous Lagash dynasty, Gudea and his descendants also promoted artistic development and left a large number of archaeological artifacts. Later, the Third Dynasty of Ur under Ur-Nammu and Shulgi (c. 2112–2004 BC, middle chronology), whose power extended as far as southern Assyria , has been erroneously called
6120-734: The earliest texts. Artifacts, and even colonies of this Uruk civilization have been found over a wide area—from the Taurus Mountains in Turkey , to the Mediterranean Sea in the west, and as far east as western Iran . The Uruk period civilization, exported by Sumerian traders and colonists, like that found at Tell Brak , had an effect on all surrounding peoples, who gradually evolved their own comparable, competing economies and cultures. The cities of Sumer could not maintain remote, long-distance colonies by military force. Sumerian cities during
6222-677: The first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca , for Italian , was published. It served as the model for similar works in French and English. In 1690 in Rotterdam was published, posthumously, the Dictionnaire Universel by Antoine Furetière for French . In 1694 appeared the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (still published, with the ninth edition not complete as of 2021 ). Between 1712 and 1721
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#17328299131916324-529: The first edition. In a later edition, they increasingly used the Bank of English established by John McHardy Sinclair at COBUILD to provide typical citations rather than examples composed by the lexicographer . The unabridged Collins English Dictionary was published on the web on 31 December 2011 on CollinsDictionary.com, along with the unabridged dictionaries of French, German, Spanish and Italian. The site also includes example sentences showing word usage from
6426-466: The first empires known to history was that of Eannatum of Lagash, who annexed practically all of Sumer, including Kish, Uruk, Ur , and Larsa , and reduced to tribute the city-state of Umma , arch-rival of Lagash. In addition, his realm extended to parts of Elam and along the Persian Gulf . He seems to have used terror as a matter of policy. Eannatum's Stele of the Vultures depicts vultures pecking at
6528-532: The first state that successfully united larger parts of Mesopotamia in the 23rd century BC. After the Gutian period , the Ur III kingdom similarly united parts of northern and southern Mesopotamia. It ended in the face of Amorite incursions at the beginning of the second millennium BC. The Amorite "dynasty of Isin " persisted until c. 1700 BC , when Mesopotamia was united under Babylonian rule. The Ubaid period
6630-555: The first to bring all these elements together, creating the first "modern" dictionary. Johnson's dictionary remained the English-language standard for over 150 years, until the Oxford University Press began writing and releasing the Oxford English Dictionary in short fascicles from 1884 onwards. A complete ten-volume first edition was not released until 1928. One of the main contributors to this modern dictionary
6732-684: The first volume of the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal which was completed in 1998. Also in 1863 Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl published the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language . The Duden dictionary dates back to 1880, and is currently the prescriptive source for the spelling of German. The decision to start work on the Svenska Akademiens ordbok was taken in 1787. The earliest dictionaries in
6834-470: The form of bilingual dictionaries, and the oldest surviving monolingual dictionaries are Chinese dictionaries c. 3rd century BCE . The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabeticall , written in 1604, and monolingual dictionaries in other languages also began appearing in Europe at around this time. The systematic study of dictionaries as objects of scientific interest arose as
6936-599: The four quarters, the pastor of the black-headed people". The Akkadians also called the Sumerians "black-headed people", or ṣalmat-qaqqadi , in the Semitic Akkadian language. The Akkadians, the East Semitic-speaking people who later conquered the Sumerian city-states , gave Sumer its main historical name, but the phonological development of the term šumerû is uncertain. Hebrew שִׁנְעָר Šinʿar , Egyptian Sngr , and Hittite Šanhar(a) , all referring to southern Mesopotamia, could be western variants of Sumer . Most historians have suggested that Sumer
7038-466: The genomes of Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic culture-bearers. Craniometric analysis has also suggested an affinity between Natufians and ancient North Africans. Some scholars associate the Sumerians with the Hurrians and Urartians , and suggest the Caucasus as their homeland. This is not generally accepted. Based on mentions of Dilmun as the “home city of the land of Sumer” in Sumerian legends and literature, other scholars have suggested
7140-408: The idea of a Proto-Euphratean language or one substrate language; they think the Sumerian language may originally have been that of the hunting and fishing peoples who lived in the marshland and the Eastern Arabia littoral region and were part of the Arabian bifacial culture. Juris Zarins believes the Sumerians lived along the coast of Eastern Arabia , today's Persian Gulf region, before it
7242-611: The industrial and academic community. In many languages, such as the English language, the pronunciation of some words is not consistently apparent from their spelling. In these languages, dictionaries usually provide the pronunciation. For example, the definition for the word dictionary might be followed by the International Phonetic Alphabet spelling / ˈ d ɪ k ʃ ə n ər i / (in British English) or / ˈ d ɪ k ʃ ə n ɛr i / (in American English). American English dictionaries often use their own pronunciation respelling systems with diacritics , for example dictionary
7344-514: The late 4th millennium BC, Sumer was divided into many independent city-states , which were divided by canals and boundary stones. Each was centered on a temple dedicated to the particular patron god or goddess of the city and ruled over by a priestly governor ( ensi ) or by a king ( lugal ) who was intimately tied to the city's religious rites. An incomplete list of cities that may have been visited, interacted and traded with, invaded, conquered, destroyed, occupied, colonized by and/or otherwise within
7446-416: The long run, however, the meanings of words in English are primarily determined by usage, and the language is being changed and created every day. As Jorge Luis Borges says in the prologue to "El otro, el mismo": " It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature. " Sometimes
7548-481: The marshlands, who may have been the ancestors of the Sumerians. Reliable historical records begin with Enmebaragesi ( Early Dynastic I ). The Sumerians progressively lost control to Semitic states from the northwest. Sumer was conquered by the Semitic-speaking kings of the Akkadian Empire around 2270 BC ( short chronology ), but Sumerian continued as a sacred language . Native Sumerian rule re-emerged for about
7650-429: The most urbanized city in the world, surpassing for the first time 50,000 inhabitants. The ancient Sumerian king list includes the early dynasties of several prominent cities from this period. The first set of names on the list is of kings said to have reigned before a major flood occurred. These early names may be fictional, and include some legendary and mythological figures, such as Alulim and Dumizid . The end of
7752-462: The north of Mesopotamia after perfecting irrigation agriculture there. The Ubaid period pottery of southern Mesopotamia has been connected via Choga Mami transitional ware, to the pottery of the Samarra period culture ( c. 5700 –4900 BC C-14 ) in the north, who were the first to practice a primitive form of irrigation agriculture along the middle Tigris River and its tributaries. The connection
7854-402: The north. Ecologically, the agricultural productivity of the Sumerian lands was being compromised as a result of rising salinity. Soil salinity in this region had been long recognized as a major problem. Poorly drained irrigated soils, in an arid climate with high levels of evaporation, led to the buildup of dissolved salts in the soil, eventually reducing agricultural yields severely. During
7956-547: The other cities in Sumer, and the large agricultural population, a rough estimate for Sumer's population might be 0.8 million to 1.5 million. The world population at this time has been estimated at 27 million. The Sumerians spoke a language isolate . A number of linguists have claimed to be able to detect a substrate language of unknown classification beneath Sumerian, because names of some of Sumer's major cities are not Sumerian, revealing influences of earlier inhabitants. However,
8058-513: The possibility that the Sumerians originated from Dilmun, which was theorized to be the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. In Sumerian mythology, Dilmun was also mentioned as the home of deities such as Enki . The status of Dilmun as the Sumerians’ ancestral homeland has not been established, but archaeologists have found evidence of civilization in Bahrain, namely the existence of Mesopotamian-style round disks. A prehistoric people who lived in
8160-461: The prehistoric Ubaid and Uruk periods. Sumerian written history reaches back to the 27th century BC and before, but the historical record remains obscure until the Early Dynastic III period, c. 23rd century BC , when the language of the written records becomes easier to decipher, which has allowed archaeologists to read contemporary records and inscriptions. The Akkadian Empire was
8262-524: The region before the Sumerians have been termed the " Proto-Euphrateans " or " Ubaidians ", and are theorized to have evolved from the Samarra culture of northern Mesopotamia. The Ubaidians, though never mentioned by the Sumerians themselves, are assumed by modern-day scholars to have been the first civilizing force in Sumer. They drained the marshes for agriculture , developed trade, and established industries, including weaving , leatherwork , metalwork , masonry , and pottery . Some scholars contest
8364-469: The rest of English, and even the 4000 most common English idioms and metaphors , can be defined. Lexicographers apply two basic philosophies to the defining of words: prescriptive or descriptive . Noah Webster , intent on forging a distinct identity for the American language, altered spellings and accentuated differences in meaning and pronunciation of some words. This is why American English now uses
8466-557: The same dictionary can be descriptive in some domains and prescriptive in others. For example, according to Ghil'ad Zuckermann , the Oxford English-Hebrew Dictionary is "at war with itself": whereas its coverage (lexical items) and glosses (definitions) are descriptive and colloquial, its vocalization is prescriptive. This internal conflict results in absurd sentences such as hi taharóg otí kshetiré me asíti lamkhonít (she'll tear me apart when she sees what I've done to
8568-433: The scribes. Gelb and Westenholz differentiate three stages of Old Akkadian: that of the pre-Sargonic era, that of the Akkadian empire, and that of the Ur III period that followed it. Akkadian and Sumerian coexisted as vernacular languages for about one thousand years, but by around 1800 BC, Sumerian was becoming more of a literary language familiar mainly only to scholars and scribes. Thorkild Jacobsen has argued that there
8670-654: The severed heads and other body parts of his enemies. His empire collapsed shortly after his death. Later, Lugal-zage-si , the priest-king of Umma, overthrew the primacy of the Lagash dynasty in the area, then conquered Uruk, making it his capital, and claimed an empire extending from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. He was the last ethnically Sumerian king before Sargon of Akkad . The Akkadian Empire dates to c. 2234 –2154 BC ( middle chronology ), founded by Sargon of Akkad . The Eastern Semitic Akkadian language
8772-664: The south of Mesopotamia as the Babylonian Empire , just as the Old Assyrian Empire had already done in the north from the late 21st century BC. The Sumerian language continued as a sacerdotal language taught in schools in Babylonia and Assyria, much as Latin was used in the Medieval period, for as long as cuneiform was used. This period is generally taken to coincide with a major shift in population from southern Mesopotamia toward
8874-473: The spelling color while the rest of the English-speaking world prefers colour . (Similarly, British English subsequently underwent a few spelling changes that did not affect American English; see further at American and British English spelling differences .) Large 20th-century dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and Webster's Third are descriptive, and attempt to describe
8976-423: The terms used to designate them. In practice, the two approaches are used for both types. There are other types of dictionaries that do not fit neatly into the above distinction, for instance bilingual (translation) dictionaries , dictionaries of synonyms ( thesauri ), and rhyming dictionaries. The word dictionary (unqualified) is usually understood to refer to a general purpose monolingual dictionary . There
9078-515: The time of the Akkadian Empire . The early 2nd millennium BCE Urra=hubullu glossary is the canonical Babylonian version of such bilingual Sumerian wordlists. A Chinese dictionary , the c. 3rd century BCE Erya , is the earliest surviving monolingual dictionary; and some sources cite the Shizhoupian (probably compiled sometime between 700 BCE to 200 BCE, possibly earlier) as
9180-461: The work was completed in 1961. Between 1861 and 1874 was published the Dizionario della lingua italiana by Niccolò Tommaseo . Between 1862 and 1874 was published the six volumes of A magyar nyelv szótára (Dictionary of Hungarian Language) by Gergely Czuczor and János Fogarasi. Émile Littré published the Dictionnaire de la langue française between 1863 and 1872. In the same year 1863 appeared
9282-661: Was A Table Alphabeticall , written by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604. The only surviving copy is found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford . This dictionary, and the many imitators which followed it, was seen as unreliable and nowhere near definitive. Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield was still lamenting in 1754, 150 years after Cawdrey's publication, that it is "a sort of disgrace to our nation, that hitherto we have had no… standard of our language; our dictionaries at present being more properly what our neighbors
9384-610: Was a temple for a goddess, or a female figure when headed by a male god) towards a more secular Lugal (Lu = man, Gal = great) and includes such legendary patriarchal figures as Dumuzid , Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh —who reigned shortly before the historic record opens c. 2900 BC, when the now deciphered syllabic writing started to develop from the early pictograms. The center of Sumerian culture remained in southern Mesopotamia, even though rulers soon began expanding into neighboring areas, and neighboring Semitic groups adopted much of Sumerian culture for their own. The earliest dynastic king on
9486-523: Was an ex-army surgeon, William Chester Minor , a convicted murderer who was confined to an asylum for the criminally insane. The OED remains the most comprehensive and trusted English language dictionary to this day, with revisions and updates added by a dedicated team every three months. In 1806, American Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language . In 1807 Webster began compiling an expanded and fully comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of
9588-410: Was associated with increased war. Cities became walled, and increased in size as undefended villages in southern Mesopotamia disappeared. Both Enmerkar and Gilgamesh are credited with having built the walls of Uruk. The dynasty of Lagash (c. 2500–2270 BC), though omitted from the king list, is well attested through several important monuments and many archaeological finds. Although short-lived, one of
9690-474: Was derived from the Samarran culture from northern Mesopotamia. It is not known whether or not these were the actual Sumerians who are identified with the later Uruk culture. The story of the passing of the gifts of civilization ( me ) to Inanna , goddess of Uruk and of love and war, by Enki , god of wisdom and chief god of Eridu, may reflect the transition from Eridu to Uruk. The archaeological transition from
9792-590: Was enlarged to become a multilingual glossary. In 1532 Robert Estienne published the Thesaurus linguae latinae and in 1572 his son Henri Estienne published the Thesaurus linguae graecae , which served up to the 19th century as the basis of Greek lexicography. The first monolingual Spanish dictionary written was Sebastián Covarrubias 's Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española , published in 1611 in Madrid, Spain. In 1612
9894-521: Was first permanently settled between c. 5500 – c. 3300 BC by a West Asian people who spoke the Sumerian language (pointing to the names of cities, rivers, basic occupations, etc., as evidence), a non-Semitic and non- Indo-European agglutinative language isolate . Others have suggested that the Sumerians were a North African people who migrated from the Green Sahara into
9996-521: Was firstly published in 1777; it has formed the basis of all similar works that have since been published. The first edition of A Greek-English Lexicon by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott appeared in 1843; this work remained the basic dictionary of Greek until the end of the 20th century. And in 1858 was published the first volume of the Deutsches Wörterbuch by the Brothers Grimm ;
10098-735: Was flooded at the end of the Ice Age . Sumerian civilization took form in the Uruk period (4th millennium BC), continuing into the Jemdet Nasr and Early Dynastic periods. The Sumerian city of Eridu , on the coast of the Persian Gulf, is considered to have been one of the oldest cities , where three separate cultures may have fused: that of peasant Ubaidian farmers, living in mud-brick huts and practicing irrigation; that of mobile nomadic Semitic pastoralists living in black tents and following herds of sheep and goats; and that of fisher folk, living in reed huts in
10200-514: Was published the Vocabulario portughez e latino written by Raphael Bluteau. The Royal Spanish Academy published the first edition of the Diccionario de la lengua española (still published, with a new edition about every decade) in 1780; their Diccionario de Autoridades , which included quotes taken from literary works, was published in 1726. The Totius Latinitatis lexicon by Egidio Forcellini
10302-404: Was the first British English dictionary to be typeset from the output from a computer database in a specified format. This meant that every aspect of an entry was handled by a different editor using different forms or templates. Once all the entries for an entry had been assembled, they were passed on to be keyed into the slowly assembled dictionary database which was completed for the typesetting of
10404-475: Was the major language. Henceforth, Sumerian remained only a literary and liturgical language, similar to the position occupied by Latin in medieval Europe. Following an Elamite invasion and sack of Ur during the rule of Ibbi-Sin (c. 2028–2004 BC), Sumer came under Amorite rule (taken to introduce the Middle Bronze Age ). The independent Amorite states of the 20th to 18th centuries are summarized as
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