The Information by James Gleick

languages possessing an alphabet: a discrete small symbol set with its own conventional sequence (“ abecedarie , the order of the Letters, or hee that useth them”). Even then the system is unnatural. It forces the user to detach information from meaning; to treat words strictly as character strings; to focus abstractly on the configuration of the word. Furthermore, alphabetical ordering comprises a pair of procedures, one the inverse of the other: organizing a list and looking up items; sorting and searching. In either direction the procedure is recursive (“ recourse , a running backe againe”). The basic operation is a binary decision: greater than or less than. This operation is performed first on one letter; then, nested as a subroutine, on the next letter; and (as Cawdrey put it, struggling with the awkwardness) “so of all the rest. &c.” This makes for astounding efficiency. The system scales easily to any size, the macrostructure being identical to the microstructure. A person who understands alphabetical order homes in on any one item in a list of a thousand or a million, unerringly, with perfect confidence. And without knowing anything about the meaning.
    Not until 1613 was the first alphabetical catalogue made—not printed, but written in two small handbooks—for the Bodleian Library at Oxford. ♦ The first catalogue of a university library, made at Leiden, Holland, two decades earlier, was arranged by subject matter, as a shelf list (about 450 books), with no alphabetical index. Of one thing Cawdrey could be sure: his typical reader, a literate, book-buying Englishman at the turn of the seventeenth century, could live a lifetime without ever encountering a set of data ordered alphabetically.
    More sensible ways of ordering words came first and lingered for a long time. In China the closest thing to a dictionary for many centuries was the
Erya
, author unknown, date unknown but probably around the third century BCE. It arranged its two thousand entries by meaning, in topical categories: kinship, building, tools and weapons, the heavens, the earth, plants and animals. Egyptian had word lists organized on philosophical or educational principles; so did Arabic. These lists were arranging not the words themselves, mainly, but rather the world: the things for which the words stood. In Germany, a century after Cawdrey, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz made this distinction explicit:
    Let me mention that the words or names of all things and actions can be brought into a list in two different ways, according to the alphabet and according to nature.… The former go from the word to the thing, the latter from the thing to the word. ♦
     
     
    Topical lists were thought provoking, imperfect, and creative. Alphabetical lists were mechanical, effective, and automatic. Considered alphabetically, words are no more than tokens, each placed in a slot. In effect they may as well be numbers.
    Meaning comes into the dictionary in its definitions, of course. Cawdrey’s crucial models were dictionaries for translation, especially a 1587 Latin-English
Dictionarium
by Thomas Thomas. A bilingual dictionary had a clearer purpose than a dictionary of one language alone: mappingLatin onto English made a kind of sense that translating English to English did not. Yet definitions were the point, Cawdrey’s stated purpose being after all to help people understand and use hard words. He approached the task of definition with a trepidation that remains palpable. Even as he defined his words, Cawdrey still did not quite believe in their solidity. Meanings were even more fluid than spellings.
Define
, to Cawdrey, was for things, not for words: “ define , to shew clearely what a thing is.” It was reality, in all its richness, that needed defining.
Interpret
meant “open, make plaine, to shewe the sence and meaning of a thing.” For him the relationship between the thing and the word was like the