The Information (10 page)

It was not easy to explain. Friar Johannes Balbus of Genoa tried in his 1286
Catholicon
. Balbus thought he was inventing alphabetical order for the first time, and his instructions were painstaking: “For example I intend to discuss
amo
and
bibo
. I will discuss
amo
before
bibo
because
a
is the first letter of
amo
and
b
is the first letter of
bibo
and
a
is before
b
in the alphabet. Similarly …”
^♦
He rehearsed a long list of examples and concluded: “I beg of you, therefore, good reader, do not scorn this great labor of mine and this order as something worthless.”

In the ancient world, alphabetical lists scarcely appeared until around 250 BCE, in papyrus texts from Alexandria. The great library there seems to have used at least some alphabetization in organizing its books. The need for such an artificial ordering scheme arises only with large collections of data, not otherwise ordered. And the possibility of alphabetical order arises only in languages possessing an alphabet: a discrete small symbol set with its own conventional sequence (“
abecedarie
, the order of the Letters, or hee that useth them”). Even then the system is unnatural. It forces the user to detach information from meaning; to treat words strictly as character strings; to focus abstractly on the configuration of the word. Furthermore, alphabetical ordering comprises a pair of procedures, one the inverse of the other: organizing a list and looking up items; sorting and searching. In either direction the procedure is recursive (“
recourse
, a running backe againe”). The basic operation is a binary decision: greater than or less than. This operation is performed first on one letter; then, nested as a subroutine, on the next letter; and (as Cawdrey put it, struggling with the awkwardness) “so of all the rest. &c.” This makes for astounding efficiency. The system scales easily to any size, the macrostructure being identical to the microstructure. A person who understands alphabetical order homes in on any one item in a list of a thousand or a million, unerringly, with perfect confidence. And without knowing anything about the meaning.

Not until 1613 was the first alphabetical catalogue made—not printed, but written in two small handbooks—for the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
^♦
The first catalogue of a university library, made at Leiden, Holland, two decades earlier, was arranged by subject matter, as a shelf list (about 450 books), with no alphabetical index. Of one thing Cawdrey could be sure: his typical reader, a literate, book-buying Englishman at the turn of the seventeenth century, could live a lifetime without ever encountering a set of data ordered alphabetically.

More sensible ways of ordering words came first and lingered for a long time. In China the closest thing to a dictionary for many centuries was the
Erya
, author unknown, date unknown but probably around the third century BCE. It arranged its two thousand entries by meaning, in topical categories: kinship, building, tools and weapons, the heavens, the earth, plants and animals. Egyptian had word lists organized on philosophical or educational principles; so did Arabic. These lists were arranging not the words themselves, mainly, but rather the world: the things for which the words stood. In Germany, a century after Cawdrey, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz made this distinction explicit:

Topical lists were thought provoking, imperfect, and creative. Alphabetical lists were mechanical, effective, and automatic. Considered alphabetically, words are no more than tokens, each placed in a slot. In effect they may as well be numbers.

Meaning comes into the dictionary in its definitions, of course. Cawdrey’s crucial models were dictionaries for translation, especially a 1587 Latin-English
Dictionarium
by Thomas Thomas. A bilingual dictionary had a clearer purpose than a dictionary of one language alone: mapping
Latin onto English made a kind of sense that translating English to English did not. Yet definitions were the point, Cawdrey’s stated purpose being after all to help people understand and use hard words. He approached the task of definition with a trepidation that remains palpable. Even as he defined his words, Cawdrey still did not quite believe in their solidity. Meanings were even more fluid than spellings.
Define
, to Cawdrey, was for things, not for words: “
define
, to shew clearely what a thing is.” It was reality, in all its richness, that needed defining.
Interpret
meant “open, make plaine, to shewe the sence and meaning of a thing.” For him the relationship between the thing and the word was like the relationship between an object and its shadow.

The relevant concepts had not reached maturity:

An earlier contemporary of Cawdrey’s, Ralph Lever, made up his own word: “
saywhat
, corruptly called a definition: but it is a saying which telleth what a thing is, it may more aptly be called a saywhat.”
^♦
This did not catch on. It took almost another century—and the examples of Cawdrey and his successors—for the modern sense to come into focus: “Definition,” John Locke finally writes in 1690, “being nothing but making another understand by Words, what Idea the Term defin’d stands for.”
^♦
And Locke still takes an operational view. Definition is communication: making another understand; sending a message.

Cawdrey borrows definitions from his sources, combines them, and adapts them. In many case he simply maps one word onto another:

For a small class of words he uses a special designation, the letter
k:
“standeth for a kind of.” He does not consider it his job to say
what
kind. Thus:

But linking pairs of words, either as synonyms or as members of a class, can carry a lexicographer only so far. The relationships among the words of a language are far too complex for so linear an approach (“
chaos
, a confused heap of mingle-mangle”). Sometimes Cawdrey tries to cope by adding one or more extra synonyms, definition by triangulation:

For other words, representing concepts and abstractions, further removed from the concrete realm of the senses, Cawdrey needs to find another style altogether. He makes it up as he goes along. He must speak to his reader, in prose but not quite in sentences, and we can hear him struggle, both to understand certain words and to express his understanding.

Among the most troublesome were technical terms from new sciences:

Not just the words but the knowledge was in flux. The language was examining itself. Even when Cawdrey is copying from Coote or Thomas, he is fundamentally alone, with no authority to consult.

One of Cawdrey’s hard usual words was
science
(“knowledge, or skill”). Science did not yet exist as an institution responsible for learning about the material universe and its laws. Natural philosophers were beginning to have a special interest in the nature of words and their meaning. They needed better than they had. When Galileo pointed his first telescope skyward and discovered sunspots in 1611, he immediately anticipated controversy—traditionally the sun was an epitome of purity—and he sensed that science could not proceed without first solving a problem of language:

When Isaac Newton embarked on his great program, he encountered a fundamental lack of definition where it was most needed. He began with a semantic sleight of hand: “I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all,”
^♦
he wrote deceptively. Defining these words was his very purpose. There were no agreed standards for weights and measures.
Weight
and
measure
were themselves vague terms. Latin seemed more reliable than English, precisely because it was less worn by everyday
use, but the Romans had not possessed the necessary words either. Newton’s raw notes reveal a struggle hidden in the finished product. He tried expressions like
quantitas materiae
. Too hard for Cawdrey: “
materiall
, of some matter, or importance.” Newton suggested (to himself) “that which arises from its density and bulk conjointly.” He considered more words: “This quantity I designate under the name of body or mass.” Without the right words he could not proceed.
Velocity, force, gravity
—none of these were yet suitable. They could not be defined in terms of one another; there was nothing in visible nature at which anyone could point a finger; and there was no book in which to look them up.

As for Robert Cawdrey, his mark on history ends with the publication of his
Table Alphabeticall
in 1604. No one knows when he died. No one knows how many copies the printer made. There are no records (“
records
, writings layde up for remembrance”). A single copy made its way to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which has preserved it. All the others disappeared. A second edition appeared in 1609, slightly expanded (“much inlarged,” the title page claims falsely) by Cawdrey’s son, Thomas, and a third and fourth appeared in 1613 and 1617, and there the life of this book ended.

It was overshadowed by a new dictionary, twice as comprehensive,
An English Expositour: Teaching the Interpretation of the hardest Words used in our Language, with sundry Explications, Descriptions, and Discourses
. Its compiler, John Bullokar, otherwise left as faint a mark on the historical record as Cawdrey did.
^♦
He was doctor of physic; he lived for some time in Chichester; his dates of birth and death are uncertain; he is said to have visited London in 1611 and there to have seen a dead crocodile; and little else is known. His
Expositour
appeared in 1616 and went through several editions in the succeeding decades. Then in 1656 a London barrister, Thomas Blount, published his
Glossographia: or a Dictionary, Interpreting all such Hard Words of Whatsoever Language,
now used in our refined English Tongue
. Blount’s dictionary listed more than eleven thousand words, many of which, he recognized, were new, reaching London in the hurly-burly of trade and commerce—

—or home-grown, such as “
tom-boy
, a girle or wench that leaps up and down like a boy.” He seems to have known he was aiming at a moving target. The dictionary maker’s “labor,” he wrote in his preface, “would find no end, since our English tongue daily changes habit.” Blount’s definitions were much more elaborate than Cawdrey’s, and he tried to provide information about the origins of words as well.