Dictionarium

In 1502 Ambrogio Calepino 's Dictionarium was published, originally a monolingual Latin dictionary, which over the course of the 16th century was enlarged to become a multilingual glossary.

Other dictionaries, such as Nathan Bailey 's Dictionarium Britannicum, included more words, and in the 150 years preceding Johnson's dictionary about twenty other general-purpose monolingual "English" dictionaries had been produced.