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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.
Baret's Alvearie of 1573 has been justly styled 'one of the most quaint and charming of all the early Dictionaries. In his 'Prefatory Address to the Reader' the author tells, in fine Elizabethan prose, both how his book came into existence, and why he gave it its curious name:
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.
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