IV. Printed bilingual dictionaries of the Western European languages (French, Spanish, Italian).

As international connections of England grew stronger and foreign trades became important to the country, Latin began to lose ground and in the XVI-th century appeared English-Italian, English-French, English-Spanish and other dictionaries.

· Palsgrave J. English-French (1530);

· Thomas W. English-Italian (1550);

· Stepney W. The Spanish Schoolmaster (1591);

V. The Period of Dictionaries of Hard Words (XVII).The first ‘real’ English dictionaries appeared in the XVII-th century. They defined English words in terms of other English words. The authors of such dictionaries concentrated on the so-called ‘hard words’ which people were not likely to know and which were coming into the language at that time in large quantities. The definitions in such dictionaries were too short to be of any value and sometimes the information given about many words was wrong. Among the first English dictionaries published at that time were:

· Robert Cawdrey ‘A Table Alphabeticall, containing and teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usuall English wordes bor­rowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine or French, etc’; the first unilingual English dictionary, explaining words by English equivalents, 1604. It was meant to explain difficult words occurring in books, (2.5,000).

· Other books followed, each longer than the pre­ceding one: Bullokar J. An English Expositor: Teaching the Interpretation of the Hardest Words, 1616 (6, 000) – different word groups are marked; * - to indicate obsolete words; Cockeram H. The English Dictionarie: or, an Interpreter of Hard English Words, 1623 (6,000) – the dictionary of elegant language; Cockeram’s book was the first in English to use the word ‘dictionary’ in the title. Blount Th. Glossographia: or a Dictionary, Interpreting all Such Hard Words, 1656 (8, 000) – a new principle of including words existing in literary texts; Coles E. An English Dictionary: Explaining the Difficult Terms, 1676 (25,000) – dialect and jargon words are included and marked by notations.

VI. The Period of the Predecessors of the explanatory dictionary of the national English language (XVII – the first half of XVIII);

· Kersey J. A New English Dictionary: or, a Compleat Collection of the Most Proper and Significant Words, Commonly Used in the language; with a Short and Clear Exposition of Difficult Words 1702 (28, 000) – the first to include simple words;

· Kersey J. The New World of Words: or a Universal English Dictionary 1706 (38, 000);

· Nathaniel Bai­ley ‘A Universal Etymolog­ical English Dictionary’ 1721, the first major attempt at a dictionary including all the words of the language, not only the difficult ones, the first to include pronunciation and etymology (40, 000);

· Nathaniel Bai­ley Dictionarium Britannicum, or a more compleat universal etymological English dictionary that any extant 1730 (48, 000) – etymology, semantic, pronunciation peculiarities of words, taken from dictionaries and texts, no notes forbidding the usage of words.