Middle English Dictionary the next several decades. The dictionary was completed in 2001. In 2007, the full dictionary was made freely available and searchable online in an HTML format. Middle English Dictionary The Middle English Dictionary is a dictionary of Middle English published by the University of Michigan. "Its 15,000 pages offer a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500, based on the analysis of a collection of over three million citation slips, the largest collection of this kind available." The project began in the 1920s. The first instalment, "Plan and Bibliography", containing a list of Middle English texts used
A Dictionary of the English Language all words which we use in the English tung...into one dictionary..." In 1598 an Italian–English dictionary by John Florio was published. It was the first English dictionary to use quotations ("illustrations") to give meaning to the word; in none of these dictionaries so far were there any actual definitions of words. This was to change, to a small extent, in schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey's "Table Alphabeticall", published in 1604. Though it contained only 2,449 words, and no word beginning with the letters "W", "X", or "Y", this was the first monolingual English dictionary. Several more dictionaries followed: in Latin, English, French