How Did They Use Lexica? An Overview of Greek-Latin Dictionaries and Their Readerships during the Sixteenth Century (1478-1595).

At the end of the fifteenth century, the spread of the Greek language in the Western Mediterranean area had to be helped by new tools: the first dictionaries were bilingual, even though they contained only basic lists of Greek words and their Latin synonyms. But when the number of students, and their ability, increased, the tools changed: although they were still bilingual because translating Greek into Latin was a method for teaching Greek, they looked more and more similar to what we would call decoding dictionaries, with examples, meanings ordered from literal to figurative, and quotations from Greek authors. The schoolbook market had changed as well: in the last forty years of the sixteenth century, the printers could no longer sell very thick dictionaries indistinctly to all the customers and they often printed the same material in two versions, one lighter, the other more erudite. We have very few witnesses as to how scholars and learners used their dictionaries. We can only guess that a dictionary was a book often kept on a desk for a long time, and that the bigger ones could be used as a kind of text database, as we would nowadays use an online Thesaurus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]