Grammar Girl here, I'm Minyeon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language, writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.

Today I have an interview with Jane Solomon.

You may remember my chat with Jane about a year ago when we talked about how dictionary.com

had started defining emoji.

While she's back today to talk about her new children's book, The Dictionary of Difficult

Words.

There's actually a long history of dictionaries that cover just difficult words.

And we talked about one from 1604 called A Table Alpha Betical.

But Jane also sent me a follow-up email with details about others and I'll share a little

bit of that with you now.

There were a bunch of subject-specific dictionaries in the 17th century that covered topics

like natural history, law, and medicine.

But there was also a trend at this time for dictionaries of thieves' can't, slang that

criminals used because of the rise in rogue literature.

People were reading about rugs and they wanted to understand the language they were reading,

so other people made dictionaries for them.

The first comprehensive English dictionary that went beyond difficult words and included

regular words like green and the was Nathaniel Bailey's and Universal Etymological English Dictionary,

which was published in 1721 and according to Jane was the most popular dictionary of

its time, more popular even than Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, which

is probably the most well-known of the early dictionaries today.

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