The Renascence of Ancient Learning had now reached England, and during the sixteenth century there were compiled and published many important Latin-English and English-Latin vocabularies and dictionaries.  Among these special mention must be made of the Dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot, Knight, the first work, so far as I know, which took to itself in English what was destined to be the famous name of DICTIONARY, in mediaeval Latin, Dictionarius liber, or Dictionarium, literally a repertory of dictiones, a word originally meaning ‘sayings,’ but already by the later Latin grammarians used in the sense of verba or vocabula ‘words.’  The early vocabularies and dictionaries had many names, often quaint and striking; thus one of c1420 is entitled the Nominale, or Name-book; mention has already been made of the Medulla Grammatices, or Marrow of Grammar, the Ortus Vocabulorum, or Garden of Words, the Promptorium Parvulorum, and the Catholicon Anglicum; later we find the Manipulus Vocabulorum, or Handful of Vocables, the Alvearie or Beehive, the Abecedarium, the Bibliotheca, or Library, the Thesaurus, or Treasury of Words—­what Old English times would have called the Word-hord, the World of Words, the Table Alphabetical, the English Expositor, the Ductor in Linguas, or Guide to the Tongues, the Glossographia, the New World of Words, the Etymologicum, the Gazophylacium; and it would have been impossible to predict in the year 1538, when Sir Thomas Elyot published his ‘Dictionary,’ that this name would supplant all the others, and even take the place of the older and better-descended word Vocabulary; much less that Dictionary should become so much a name to conjure with, as to be applied to works which are not word-books at all, but reference-books on all manner of subjects, as Chronology, Geography, Music, Commerce, Manufactures, Chemistry, or National Biography, arranged in Alphabetical or ‘Dictionary order.’  The very phrase, ‘Dictionary order,’ would in the first half of the sixteenth century have been unmeaning, for all dictionaries were not yet alphabetical.  There is indeed no other connexion between a dictionary and alphabetical order, than that of a balance of convenience.  Experience has shown that though an alphabetical order makes the matter of a dictionary very disjointed, scattering the terminology of a particular art, science, or subject, all over the book, and even when related words come together, often putting the unimportant derivative in front of the important primitive word, it is yet that by which a word or heading can be found, with least trouble and exercise of thought.  But this experience has been only gradually acquired; even now the native dictionaries of some Oriental languages are often not in alphabetical order; in such a language as Chinese, indeed, there is no alphabetical order