The Abecedarium, although it gives the Latin equivalents, may be looked upon to some extent as an English dictionary, for many of the words have an English explanation, as well as a Latin rendering; thus Almesse, or gift of dryncke, meate, or money, distributed to the poore, sporta, sportula; Amyable, pleasante, or hauing a good grace, amabilis; Anabaptistes, a sorte of heretyques of late tyme in Germanye about the yere of our Lorde God 1524.... Anabaptistæ.
Of all the works which we have yet considered, Latin was an essential element: whether the object was, as in the glossaries and vocabularies before the fifteenth century, to explain the Latin words themselves, or as in the Promptorium and Catholicon, the Abecedarium and the Alvearie, and other works of the sixteenth century, to render English words into Latin.
Between the dates of the Abecedarium and the Alvearie, Peter Levins, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, published, in 1570, the first essay at an English Riming Dictionary, the Manipulus Vocabulorum, or Handful of Vocables, an original copy of which is in the Bodleian Library; it was reprinted for the Early English Text Society in 1867 by Mr. H.B. Wheatley.
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