After lexicography had lain dormant for some time, it was given a fresh impulse by the Revival of Learning

The use of Latin as a means of communication among educated men of different nationalities resulted in vocabularies becoming necessary, which at first explained the meanings of words in simpler Latin, but tended more and more to use the vernacular languages of the time.

In England, the making of such word-books started between 600 and 700 A.D., but their development was retarded for more than three centuries by the Norman Conquest, since it was not until the close of the fourteenth century that English finally gained the ascendancy over French and became the recognized language of the schools.

The period which followed the victory of the mother tongue is marked by the appearance of a great number of Latin-English word-books, not yet called dictionaries, but bearing various fanciful titles, such as Medulla Grammatices, or "Marrow of Grammar", Ortus (i.e. Hortus) Vocabulorum, or "Garden of words", and the like.

A second stage was represented by the Promptorium Parvulorum, the "Children's Storehouse", which contained about 10,000 English words with their Latin equivalents.

The first work of the kind to be termed a "Dictionary" was that of Sir Thomas Elyot, Knight, issued in 1538. The number of Latin-English and English-Latin lexicons was very large and they were showing a consistent improvement. Because of the high demands made by the modern science of lexicography, there was still no dictionary either of Greek or of Latin which was regarded as adequate.

The next step forward was made by Richard Howlet, whose Abecedarium, issued in 1552, besides giving the Latin equivalents for a large number of English words, also gave English definitions of some of the more difficult terms.

Next, the dying out of Latin as a means of communication led to a more general study of modern languages. Dante had long since made an appeal for greater attention to Italian in his De Vulgari Eloquio, but it was not until the early part of the sixteenth century that Dictionaries of English in connection with a modern language were put forth.

One of the earliest was the Esclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse (1530), which was soon followed by dictionaries of Spanish and Italian, and shortly after that by a polyglot lexicon in eleven languages, called the Ductor in Linguas, or "Guide into Tongues".

Dictionaries of Greek, Latin and the modern foreign languages had an obvious practical purpose, but the necessity for an English dictionary did not suggest itself until the end of the sixteenth century, when it was brought to mind by the introduction into English of many learned or "book" words, the meanings of which could not be grasped in the ordinary way, but required definitions by specialists.

So it was, that English dictionaries had in the beginning the same aim as the glossaries of the Greeks and Romans; that is, the definitions of the "hard" words of the language. This is explicitly set forth in the title of Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, published in 1604, in which he explains the meaning of about 3,000 such terms.

His work passed through three editions and then was replaced with the English Expositor, or Exposition of Hard Words, of John Bullokar (1616). A new approach was made by the English Dictionary of Henry Cockeram (1623), which consisted of three parts:

1. The first contained the "hard" words with their definitions.
2. The second gave a list of ordinary words provided with their learned equivalents, so enabling the ambitious and industrious to substitute elegant and high-sounding germs for those current in every-day life, and so improve their style and conversation.
3. The third part furnished an explanation of the classical, historical, and mythological allusions met with in literature, besides giving information about important people, marvelous animals, and so forth.

In 1656, a Glossographia, an explanation of obscure legal terms, was published by Thomas Blount, who enlivened the sober annals of the science by his controversy with Edward Phillips, declaring that the latter's New World of Words and Nomothetes were clumsy plagiarisms of his own books.

The general tendency was to add more and more of the common words of the language

A series of dictionaries by Coles (1677), Cocker (1704), and Kersey (1708), continued this good work; and finally, in 1721, Nathaniel Bailey issued his Universal Etymological English Dictionary. This was the first work of the kind to aim at a complete collection of all the words of our mother tongue, a step made necessary by the special attention which was given to etymology.

Because while the editor did not consider it essential to give a common word like "cat" a fuller definition than "a creature well known", the derivation of words was equally important.

Bailey's work at once proved popular and went through a number of editions. In that year of 1731, he marked a further advance by indicating the proper accentuation of the words. His dictionary also included many legal and technical terms, as well as, "the Etymology and Interpretation of Proper Names of Men and Women and Remarkable Places in Great Britain".

In 1730, with the help of several specialists, Bailey brought out his folio edition, into which he introduced diagrams and proverbs. An interleaved copy of this edition formed the working basis for Johnson's Dictionary.