A comprehensive account of dictionaries during a key period in their development, when they were compiled in academies across Europe.

This is the first unified history of the large, prestigious dictionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, compiled in academies, which set out to gl

"This is the first unified history of the large, prestigious dictionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, compiled in academies, which set out to g

Nineteenth-century readers had an appetite for books so big they seemed to contain the whole world: immense novels, series of novels, encyclopaedias. Especially

Winner of the PROSE Award An NRC Handelsblad Best Book of the Year “Ambitious and impressive...At a time when the very survival of both freedom and democracy