Papias the Lexicographer

Papias was an Italian scholar who worked in the 1040s and 1050s, probably at or near Pavia in Lombardy, which is why he is usually called Papias the Lombard, though even that is a guess. He appears to have been a cleric with a family; he says in his preface that he undertook the work for the sake of his sons. He was dead or done by about 1060. The name may not even be his own; papias is a Greek word for a guide or doorkeeper, and it may be a pen name.

What he made is one of the quiet turning points in the history of learning.

Before Papias, a medieval student who hit a word he did not know had glossaries, lists of hard words with rough equivalents, usually attached to one particular text, often disordered, frequently wrong. There was no book you could simply look a word up in.

Papias spent about ten years building one. The Elementarium doctrinae rudimentum, the elementary groundwork of instruction, is the first work in the West that a modern reader would recognize as a dictionary. He arranged the entries alphabetically by the first three letters of the word, which sounds trivial and was not; nobody had done it consistently before. He explained Latin in Latin. He gave meanings, grammatical information, etymologies, and encyclopedic notes. And he named his sources, the first lexicographer to tell his reader where an explanation came from, so it could be checked.

He wrote it, he said, so that the young could get at the fathers and at Scripture without a teacher standing over them at every line.

It worked. The Elementarium was copied all over Europe for four hundred years; well over a hundred manuscripts survive. Hugh of Pisa built on it, and so did Giovanni Balbi, whose Catholicon was among the earliest books printed. Papias himself was printed at Milan in 1476 and again several times in Venice. Dante used him. Chaucer's century used him.

The author of the first modern dictionary is a man about whom we know almost nothing, not his birthplace, not his death date, not reliably his name.

He should not be confused with the second-century Papias of Hierapolis, the hearer of the apostolic generation who wrote about the origins of the Gospels; the two are separated by nine hundred years and are regularly mixed up in old catalogues.

Sources: Papias, Elementarium doctrinae rudimentum (Milan, 1476; Venice, 1485); The Oxford History of English Lexicography, ed. A. P. Cowie; Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages; L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars.