Vocabularies were useful tools in class, and the shorter ones could be committed to memory, but teachers and older scholars needed guides to the whole range of Latin words. It was in this field that medieval scholars made one of their chief contributions to knowledge by inventing the dictionary in its modern form. An early work that can be used for this purpose was the Liber Etymologiarum (‘book of etymologies’) by Isidore of Seville (c. 560 – 636), an encyclopedia in which the different branches of knowledge were described and the terminology of each one traced and explained. <….> The next stage of development was represented by the Elementarium of Papias, a Lombard of Pavia, whose preface tells us that others had tried to compile a dictionary and that he had given ten years to the task, which he probably completed in about 1053. The Elementarium is basically a word list in alphabetical order. <…> the Elementarium shines as a pioneer work, struggling to evolve the techniques of arrangement that we take for granted.
<…>
The modern kind of dictionary was most fully realized by Giovanni Balbi, John of Genoa, or Januensis as he was called in Latin. Balbi, a Dominican friar, completed his Cathlicon (a word signifying totality) in about 1286. <…> It follows an alphabetical order down to the last letter of every word, entries provide stems, principal paradigms, etymologies and meanings.