Grammar Girl here. I'm Injohn Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to talk about what you can learn about words from dictionary labels and why the words for mother are so similar in so many languages.

Dictionaries are one of the most important tools writers have at their fingertips, besides a good style guide. They not only tell us what words mean,

they also tell us the history of those words, how to pronounce them, and how they're used in

different contexts. Further, each dictionary uses its

own set of labels that give specific information about how words are used, such as informal and slang.

As Georgia Southern University professor, writer, and editor Richard Nordquist explained in an article

for Thoughtco, labels and usage notes

indicate, quote, particular limitations on the use of a word or particular contexts or registers,

or how we use language differently in different circumstances, whether in speaking, writing,

or even sign language, unquote. Over the years, these labels have

expanded in line with our changing language. First, let's touch briefly on the history of

dictionaries and how labels came to be. According to Oxford dictionaries, the earliest dictionaries

were nothing more than glossaries that translated

Latin words into Old English, the form of English spoken before about 1,100 AD.

The first monolingual dictionaries appeared in about 1600 and mostly defined the quote-unquote

hard words in English.

By the 1800s, dictionaries started to expand their entries

to include pronunciation, word origin, and parts of speech.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, they became more inclusive

and began to cover, quote,

types of language that had not previously been considered appropriate, for example, slang, regional words, or technical

jargon, unquote. Today, dictionaries focus on how words are used in the real world. Most

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