The art and craft of writing dictionaries is called lexicography.

The "Erya", from the early 3rd century BC, was the first Chinese language dictionary. The book organized Chinese characters by semantic groups. The intention of this dictionary was to explain the true meaning and interpretation of words in the context of older ancient texts.

One of the earliest dictionaries known, and which is still extant today in an abridged form, was written in Latin during the reign of the emperor Augustus. It is known by the शीर्षक "De Significatu Verborum" ("On the meaning of words") and was originally compiled by Verrius Flaccus. It was twice abridged in succeeding centuries, first by Sextus Pompeius Festus, and then by Paul the Deacon. Verrius Flaccus' dictionary was an abridged list of difficult or antiquated words, whose usage was illustrated by quotations from early Roman authors.

The word "dictionary" comes from neoclassical Latin, "dictio", meaning simply "word".

The first true English dictionary was Robert Cawdrey's "Table Alphabeticall" of 1604, although it only included 3,000 words and the definitions it contained were little more than synonyms. The first one to be at all comprehensive was Thomas Blount's dictionary "Glossographia" of 1656. Though many believe that Samuel Johnson's famous and more complete dictionary of 1755 was the first dictionary it was predated by Blount, as well as Kersey and Bailey.

In 1806, Noah Webster's dictionary was published by the G&C Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts which still publishes "Merriam-Webster" dictionaries, but the term "Webster's" is considered generic and can be used by any dictionary.

The most complete dictionary of the English language is the "ऑक्सफर्ड इंग्लिश डिक्शनरी". The first edition was properly begun in 1860 and was completed in 1928, by which time a supplement that took an additional five years to complete was already necessary.

The largest dictionary in the world is "het Woordenboek der Nederlansche Taal (WNT)" (the Dictionary of the Dutch language). It took 134 years to create the dictionary (1864 - 1998). It consists of approximately 400,000 words on 45805 pages in 92000 columns.

Lexicography
Character dictionaries
Word order
Bilingual dictionaries